Lot of chatter about this Rolling Stone article discussing whether the ‘04 election was stolen. My philosophy on these things are: if we actually fought these elections, as Democrats, they couldn’t be stolen in the first place. I don’t personally believe ‘04 was stolen, but the theft of 2000 was pretty clear. But its also kind of moot. There’s no undoing either election, and while the challenges from both Al Gore and John Kerry were not vigorous enough, if the margin of victory was better than 0.5% and 3% these things don’t matter at all. Yes, the Democratic party should have as one of its foundational elements that it fights for the right to have every vote counted – but those kinds of beliefs go nowhere if we lose elections in a squeaker.
>> I do find the conspiracy theories about how the liberal blogosphere has been bought off by the man to be intriguing. But then, Mr. Murdoch’s check didn’t bounce.
It’s really too bad that we’ve adopted the attitude that once the election is “certified” we can no longer examine any irregularities. I guess it’s the old 9/10ths equalling posession. No wonder Rethugs told Bush in 2000 to act like he already owned the place.
At this rate Dems will never be allowed to win another national election. We know they stole both 2000 and 2004, they pretty much said they would (Diebold’s CEO). Now that optical scan can voting machines are the law of the land, they’ll only get better at stealing future elections.
You’re right in that there’s nothing to be done about 2000 and 2004. Why this is important, however, is because of all future elections. If one can see the tactics in play during the past two, it is easier to respond to them in the next one.
That said, you’re right…Democrats really do need to fight harder.
That’s (one of) the biggest differences between Reps and Dems.
Dems want to count every vote.
Reps want to count every legal vote.
I can only hope that you buy into the paranoid delusion that the election in 2000 or 2004 was stolen, get very angry and as a party, behave as very angry entities behave. That means in an election year in which we should lose, we will win. And then maybe you will get even angrier and blow 2012. In all seriousness, this is what puts you in league with the Wellstone plane bomber conspiracy believers and the Bush-dynamited-the-dykes theorists. And, hey, maybe that plane did not hit the Pentagon. Your problem is that river in Egypt: de nial.
Dugger
Except while those things involve the belief in the improbable, the documented devaluation of votes in Florida in 2000 is pretty slam dunk. But as I said, the way to get around that is to win by 10+%.
Dems want to count every vote.
Cons want only Republican votes to count.
An impartial panel of journalists determined that Gore’s “uncounted votes” (Palm Beach area) were not equal to Bush’s “uncounted votes” (western panhandle), so Bush would have won a total recount
Frank D.: You’re wrong, Gore would have won if they counted every vote. He would’ve lost, oddly enough, if the court had only counted the precincts he originally asked for.
O Dub: First, the whole point of the article is that people worked really really hard and we still lost. How does hard work beat the GOP ability to erase 357000 of your votes? Shouldn’t we vigorously oppose their tactics?
Two, the only way we can change these things is to understand the caging tactics in full and fight them. That’s what Greg Pallast is arguing. The GOP is planning on taking Ohio and Florida nationwide for 2008, which means that by 2010 you will finally admit “yeah they stole it in 2000 and 2004 but I’m not sold yet on 2008, not sure how we lost Maryland but…we’ll get em the next time I reckons…”
Three, this is the main issue. Everything else is incidental. If you don’t change it, then it will 2012 and you’ll be bloggin in the gulag somewheres wondering “Jeez we need to work harder. How could the GOP win every house and senate seat with those Diebold machines? I’ll never figure it out…”
Philip Shropshire
http://www.threeriversonline.com
PS: You can’t win convincely if you’re a Democrat. You can win electorally with a 17 to 19 state strategy. But if you’re only going to win by one or two states then you have to fight for those votes….
http://archive.democrats.com/display.cfm?id=248
http://archive.democrats.com/display.cfm?id=181
As for 2004…
Wrong exit polls, but just in the swing states…
350,000 voters kept away or had their votes discarded…
Bush went from down by 3-5% to up by 3-5% in hours in every swing state, taking every single one (that alone, I mean, come ON…)
Massive touchscreen electronic voting bias towards Bush…
Yet ANOTHER controversial finish in a state with a Republican govenor who just also happens to be a major player in the Bush campaign effort (co-chair to Harris’ director position)…
Fake “terrorist” alert to permit a lockdown of the administration building to block independent scrutiny of the vote count…
and on and on it goes…
I’d say there is enough there to warrant a much MUCH closer look.
Wait, Dugger, Frank, and Farris say Bush won and we’re idiots.
Nevermind.
Doh! I mean “secretary of state,” not “govenor. ”
Man, gotta stop commenting on more than one thread at a time…
“An impartial panel of journalists determined that Gore s uncounted votes (Palm “Beach area) were not equal to Bush s uncounted votes (western panhandle), so Bush would have won a total recount”
Maybe so, but determination of the outcome is not supposed done by journalists. It’s supposed to be determined by the voters or their representatives. The bottom line is all of the votes should have been counted and all of the laws enforced as to which votes could be counted and which were not, period. Furthermore elections are the jurisdiction of the states and unless someone’s constitutional rights were or potentially were being violated, there is no justification for interference by the USSC. If the state could not resolve the matter, the responsibility falls to the House of Representatives, according to the Consitution.
That is the real tragedy of the 2000 election, regardless of who woulda, shoulda or coulda won. The results of that election, i.e. the “Bush Presidency”, speaks for itself.
Here is the real question:
How did the (as proclaimed by the leftists) brilliant, incumbent VP AlGOre lose to the (according to the leftists), idiot-savant Chimpy McBushhitler in 2000.
Repeat same question only insert Kerry’s name for 04.
Maybe, just maybe the leftists really don’t have much of a grasp on reality. Perhaps, just perhaps, Bush actually left Yale with a better GPA than John F’ing Kerry?
Untill you actually start seeing the real world, not the smoke and mirrors of the liberal mind, you won’t actually win electiions. And if you spend most of your time trying to figure out which conspiracy caused you to lose, you won’t see what REALLY caused you to lose, so you are doomed to repeat the cycle.
The bottom line is all of the votes should have been counted
Again with the myth that all the votes weren’t counted. They were counted like 3 times by the various counties. They were counted by the media. Gore lost. It’s over. Freaking deal with it.
THIS is why Democrats can’t win elections. They spend so much time trying to convince everybody that they’re right and everybody else is wrong and therefore, the only reason why they lost is because the elections were stolen.
Stop being such goddamned babies already and try and win in the marketplace of ideas not conspiracy theories.
“Stop being such goddamned babies already and try and win in the marketplace of ideas not conspiracy theories. ”
LOL
I guess some people are so eager to dump that they neglect to actually read first. Just copy and shoot from the hip, sorta like your boy Bush.
If you had actually READ the entire post you would have realized that I was not “crying” about anything. I didn’t vote for either one of these guys and am not a democrat. My post was about how it was was handled. If the shoe were on the other foot republicans would be still crying foul.
The last WA governor’s race is a perfect example. Talk about crybabies, 7 months after the frigging election they finally give it up because none of their stunts worked this time. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8119215/ .
As Bugs Bunny says:
What a moroon!
http://archive.democrats.com/display.cfm?id=181
If the above link doesn’t cover whatever “recount” shows Bush as the winner, then please give a link to the appropriate news source and stop leaning on the time worn “shut up, conspiracy nuts” dodge to avoid real debate…again.
The whole point of keeping this issue alive is to clean up future elections, not overturn past ones. Now that we have not one, but two partisan votes added to the Supreme Court, we should be doubly worried about 2006, 2008, and beyond.
My philosophy on these things are: if we actually fought these elections, as Democrats, they couldn t be stolen in the first place.
That’s a dangerous philosophy, because it makes you have to judge when you’ve ‘fought enough’ to win against fraud, judging it only against the precedent of elections lost after fraud.
Think of it as the equivalent of a football game played with no-one watching, where all you know is the team’s preparation and the final score. There are rumors that the officials threw the game with their calls. But you don’t know for sure. So you look at what you do know: the team’s preparation, and what the pundits said going into it.
THIS is why Democrats can t win elections.
And this is why GOP clichés are very very dull. What a sad little concern troll you are. Keep supporting fraudsters, trolls, and the courts will keep locking them up.
More people voted for Al Gore in 2000, even taking the Florida result as legit. More would have voted for him if he hadn’t run such a stilted campaign. Kerry was never a great candidate, but became even less so at the presidential level. He was excellent in the three debates but never had a clue about running an aggresive 21st century campaign – something Bush and his team excelled at. Bush won on terror and the war, and Kerry refused to distinguish his position from Bush’s.
If you want to spin this as a rejection of liberalism and an embrace of conservatism please explain to me how all that capital spent on privatizing social security went.
I say we postpone this discussion until about, say, November 13, 2006. Then maybe we can see “knows how to play this game.”
Sounds like a winner, Frank. Let’s settle this one “on the field”.
I love it when right wing idiots — who themselves still believe that things are going swimmginly in Iraq and that humans aren’t contributing to global warming — lecture liberals on “reality.” Not a single right wing hack here has provided a single link to anything that rebuts the facts in Kenndey’s article. Not a single link to anywhere or even an attempt to rebut that actual facts reported on. Just more bullshit rhetoric.
Here let me help you doofuses out:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/03/kennedy/print.html
However rather than worrying about the past, democrats need
to learn from the past and prepare for next time to make sure it doesn’t happen again, or at least any attempts are unsuccessful. Given the current environment, a lot has to change for them to be able to pull something like this off in ‘06. They’ve already resorted to cheap stunts to
try and energize their base (whatever that is left).
“After carefully examining the evidence, I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Whether or not they were actually successful in “stealing” the election for Bush is not his only point. The fact is there is considerable evidence shown that there was an effort on the part of republicans to affect the outcome. That in itself is enough to concern any reasonable person, especially democrats.
I read RFKJr’s article–I find the evidence compelling, and well researched. Perhaps the most compelling, is the fact that the exit polling was so off, as to defy any logical conclusion other than the fact that a hell of a lot of John Kerry votes did not get counted.
Do I now think that GOP operatives tried to stifle the 2004 Democratic vote in Ohio? Yes.
Would it have made a difference? Would John Kerry be President? We’ll never know.
People like Dugger and Jay mock us for even bringing it up, but in the end, all you can do is point to the evidence. There’s far more evidence of wrongdoing than there is that nothing out of the ordinary happened. That’s for sure.
Dugger’s post, in particular, is sophmoric in tone. Well, I guess that should be expected from someone whos vocabulary reflects that of the average 10th grader.
I don’t find OW’s comment particularly compelling. You shouldn’t have to “overcome” election fraud by ensuring a victory by 10% or more.
The GOP operatives who are doing it, or who have done it, should be rightfully exposed as RFKJr has done here, and if found guilty, should be sized up for orange jumpsuits.
Look, they’re sleazy people. Remember Atwater and Horton? Rove going after McCain as mentally unstable (or was that his wife?). Let’s not forget Ken Starr and his sex report. And the “SwiftBoating” of a decorated war veteran in John Kerry. They’re scum. The lowest common denominator.
I don’t know how you beat them other than to put people up against them that are one-step ahead of them. (Bill Clinton, as one example.)
JK