Holy fuck - I'd been wondering how that whole election thing turned out.
Funny how the cool guy is NOT the war hero.
B U _ _
S H _ _
Saw that a few days ago, it was a bumper sticker.
I want one.
Hey bees: have you seen this one yet?
I'm hoping to get one....some day.
Teehee
Hmm, a lot of those shots seem to be of Kerry not managing to kiss his spouse...
Kerry was a huge dork. The photo on page 7 of him kicking a football is hilarious.
There is a huge block of voters who don't care about policy and just couldn't identify with Kerry. It's easy to see why.
Of course, in Canada's recent election, our huge dork won. (Maybe it helped that he was running against two other dorks)
"...and just couldn't identify with Kerry."
But they could identify with the other insanely-rich guy.
*sigh*
I saw interviews with ranchers just before the '04 election and the actually thought Bush was "one of them" and Kerry wasn't.
I know it's hard for a "regular guy" to become president, but how hard is it to find somebody who can at least act the part?
my understanding is that bush's first election campaign in texas was unsuccessful partly because his opponent managed to paint him as a east-coast ivy leaguer. apparently this was how bush came across to voters at the time.
so he cowboyed it up or texed it up and did it successfully enough to become gubner and now presnint.
Did the people who just voted for Bush because he's more photogenic really turn out to the polls, though? Why would they even bother? I always thought the notion that we should just encourage everyone to vote, regardless of how much they care about politics was kind of stupid for this reason.
stupid, obvious troll. george w. bush is a miserable failure and couldn't bumble his way out of a wet paper bag.
MonkeyFilter: in Canada's recent election, our huge dork won
Congrats Koko! 4 more years! 4 more years!
/elbow-elbow-wrist-wrist-wrist
hehe
*catches beads, lifts shirt*
THose are hilarious. However, it still looks clear that Kerry would have a pretty nasty split-finger fastball.
THose are hilarious. However, it still looks clear that Kerry would have a pretty nasty split-finger fastball.
If the Democrats would have run photos of Bush as a cheerleader, then Bush would have lost the election. You can bet that the image of Kerry as a cheerleader would have been seared into everyone's mind if Kerry had been a cheerleader. To this day, most people do not know that Bush was a cheerleader.
I would have put up images side by side of Kerry in military uniform and Bush in cheerleading uniform in all ads if I was a Democrat. The Democrats did not, and they lost.
If my pals controlled the senate and made the vote-counting thingamajigs, even I could win the election, even if my campaing photos showed my running naked, painted blue and wearing moose's horns.
I looked at those, and my first thought was that the Bush campaign had better image management. Either that, or the photographers were looking for the flattering ones -- many of the images of Kerry would have been flattering if they came a second later (like throwing the ball).
My second thought was that if the photographers are not biased (I have no idea) and the campaign did not strictly control access and/or published, Bush would have to be a very good actor or model, someone with a real sense of what he looks like from the outside. It's a talent.
Not one I look for in a world leader - there I would prefer intelligence, wisdom, integrity and honesty (and definitly not truthiness) - but a talent.
Oh - a friend reminds me that there were at the time of the election a bunch of jokey websites using very expensive newswire photos (which they would have had to buy) popping up to make fun of Kerry. That's real grassroots for you.
At this point, I don't even care about the Republican stance. Their behaviour (negative campaigning, defamation, slander) is just so despicable, so slimy that the party disgusts me. I could perhaps respectfully disagree with an honest conservative, but I don't know why any honest conservatives in the US let themselves be led by such an immoral party.
running naked, painted blue and wearing moose's horns
Might alienate the "red" states!
Nothing like choices.
And we picked the idiot.
Yeah, Douglas would have won today.
this is the "OMG Bush said the internets LOL!!1111" thing from the other side of the fence. Just as unfunny (and old by now) and just as irrelevant to who won the election.
Kerry had no charisma, was a hypocrite who only turned against the war when Dean was ahead of him, stood for nothing, and ran an awful campaign.
Yeah, not hammering on Bush = male cheerleader was pretty emblematic of the Democratic lack of strategy and killer instinct. Politics in the media age is decided on the most superficial level. (Which is why I'll never fear that Newt Gingrich could ever become president.)
Did the people who just voted for Bush because he's more photogenic really turn out to the polls, though?
Um, how do I put the cold, harsh reality of elections gently?
Politics in the media age is decided on the most superficial level.
Ah, there we go. Thanks, furiousdork.
Mind you, some people _do_ take the time--as every citizen should, but there's far more blinders on in voting than there ought to be.
Gimme the actual RFKjr article, H-dogg!
*hopes blog-guy is right and article is good*
Confirmed here, and you know it has to be true, as the site features ads for both Absinthe AND dried poppies.
Note that print version only works for part 1 of 4.
*sticks tongue out at petebest*
fascist!
"A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)"
"What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)"
"The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)"
> statistical odds against ... shy of one in 3 billion.
is it possibile that voters exiting the polling station (a) told surveyors what they thought the surveyor wanted to hear and/or (b) were more likely to consent to an interview if they'd voted kerry?
both of these are considered factors in the wrongness of almost all the pre-election polls in britain in the 1992 general election: shy tory factor
possibile being a conditional form of stomach acid
is it possibile that voters exiting the polling station (a) told surveyors what they thought the surveyor wanted to hear and/or (b) were more likely to consent to an interview if they'd voted kerry?
He addresses the "shy voter" factor in the article. The short version: the numbers don't really support it. As to "telling surveyors what they want to hear," that strikes me as odd. I can understand not wanting to tell someone who you picked, but lying about your choice? On such a massive scale that 67% on the exit polls turns out to be 38% in counted votes? That is a MONUMENTAL statistical shift. The sort of thing that simply does not happen in exit polling.
By the way, I love that the only national reporter to question the numbers was Keith freaking Olbermann. Only one more reason to love the man. A true baseball fan trusts only the numbers, and when they don't add up, he cries foul.
> lying about your choice?
some pol-scis theorized in britain post-1992 that people were embarrassed about being tories and would not admit to it when polled. so they voted tory for selfish (generally pecuniary) reasons but realized that this was an unpopular thing to do.
i don't know the context (either ohio or how u.s. exit polls work) well enough to say if this could be a factor in this case.
Americans generally are either completely unwilling to discuss politics or else DAMN PROUD of their choices, in my experience. There are exceptions, of course, but my guess is the average American would just decline to be polled rather than lie to a pollster, if it came to that. Not to mention that the current political climate is still (and may forever be, God help us all) predominantly socially conservative, particularly in most Midwestern and Southern areas. "Left" in the US is at best centrist in most of the industrialized world.
I notice that now Bush is really on the ropes, the right wing astroturfers really come out of the fucking woodwork.
"Blackwell did manage to ban reporters from a post-election ballot-counting site in Warren County because—election officials claimed—the FBI had warned of an impending terrorist attack there. The FBI said it issued no such warning, however, and the officials refused to name the agent who alerted them. Moreover, as the Cincinnati Enquirer later reported, email correspondence between election officials and the county’s building services director indicated that lockdown plans—“down to the wording of the signs that would be posted on the locked doors”—had been in the works for at least a week. Beyond suggesting that officials had something to hide, the ban was also, according to the report, a violation of Ohio law and the Fourteenth Amendment. "
"In Franklin County, a worker at a Holiday Inn observed a team of 25 people who called themselves the “Texas Strike Force” using payphones to make intimidating calls to likely voters, targeting people recently in the prison system. The “Texas Strike Force” paid their way to Ohio, but their hotel accommodations were paid for by the Ohio Republican Party, whose headquarters is across the street. The hotel worker heard one caller threaten a likely voter with being reported to the FBI and returning to jail if he voted. Another hotel worker called the police, who came but did nothing. "
Wow. That's not illegal as far as I know, but wow.
Salon says it's bullshit but Salon has a documented liberal bias. You can't believe a word printed in there. Ergo the election was stolen!
Sorry, couldn't resist. I'll go now....
Huh, I'll check with Fox, see what Rupert Murdoch wants me to know today.
Seriously though, what would it take to drag the "the media is biased against conservatives" meme into an alley somewhere and bludgeon it to death?
The media is madly pro-Bush and pro-Republican ( I wouldn't say they are pro-conservative - I miss conservative Republicans) and the pattern doesn't seem likely to change soon.
Once everyone realizes that the media are simply purveyors of entertainment and not the objective documentarians they pretend to be, we'll all be better off.
homonculus - Farhad Manjoo's rebuttals are just as error-prone as the RFKjr stuff. I wouldn't put too much stock in either one of them - they're both biased as hell.
James Carville gets on the phone with his wife, Mary Matalin, who is at the White House with Bush.
"Carville told her he had some inside news. The Kerry campaign was going to challenge the provisional ballots in Ohio -- perhaps up to 250,000 of them. 'I don't agree with it, Carville said. I'm just telling you that's what they're talking about.'
"Matalin went to Cheney to report...You better tell the President Cheney told her."
Matalin does, advising Bush that "somebody in authority needed to get in touch with J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Republican Secretary of State in Ohio who would be in charge of any challenge to the provisional votes." An SOS goes out to Blackwell.
Is that true?
I don't know. Have Kennedy or Kerry read the book? The media probably won't notice, unless maybe Blackwell sent some dirty emails to Foley...
I still can't understand why this isn't huge news. You know, "Your democracy may well be a sham."
Meanwhile, it's certainly not the first time, as a reading of Robert Caro's excellent LBJ bio Means of Ascent will show you.
What HW said. Perhaps everyone is simply jaded at this point?
I think you've hit the nail on the head, SMT.
Lots of people simply will not believe it, and lots of other people really don't care.
I would further qualify that a bit - I'm not sure it's "don't care" in the sense of "aren't bothered," but "don't care" in the sense of "are so inured to this sort of thing that A. it's not surprising and B. protest seems futile."
Batman!H-dogg!