Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Electioneering

Voice of the Mountain

by Shawn K. Inlow

Rachel Maddow is the smartest woman on teevee.  No, she is.  And while she's an avowed liberal - dirty word, right? - and a lesbian, she still journalistically cleans just about everyone left standing's clock.  Because no matter what you label or libel her she's just way smarter than most of us.  And she's got a teevee show where she gets to flex.

I have a video that I want you to watch of the first segment of Rachel's show from the day after (11/7/12) the recent presidential election.  It may be the best essay she's ever written.  She begins with a repeating theme of "We're not going to (blank)," where she fills in an alarming number of alarming actual proposals made by the Clown-Car full of candidates that was the republican primary field this year.

Then she segues around 12:50 into a repeating theme of a litany of what "really" happened before rolling into a call for the republican party to wake up after a theme of things some republicans believe that are provably false.

But, before you click the video below, I want you to know that I think Rachel misses one key point in this particularly expert analysis.  I'll point it out after you spend the next 15 minutes with the smartest woman on teevee.  I think - and maybe some of my conservative friends would do me the service of telling me whether or not I'm right - this is cough syrup for the republican party.


At about 10:50 of this segment we get to watch a series of wildly inaccurate predictions about the upcoming elections and then we get the pure horror-show of Fox News' election night coverage.  Here is the sticking point that I'm concerned with.  

Let me digress.  I was a journalist for about ten years before I became a Pennsylvania State Trooper.  Now that I'm retired, I'm going back to journalism and writing again...  Thank you for visiting.  But Rachel, in my view, reads something slightly wrong here.  She posits that the GOP operatives on display here were "so sure" and "didn't see it coming," but I think she gets the reason wrong.

Journalism and police work are quite alike in that we spend time looking at a lot of liars and people with certain agendas.  It is our job to find the truth.  To investigate.  And sometimes you have to consider not what you see but why you see it.

We don't have to question that we see Karl Rove - a villain in my book - doing a spit take.  We don't have to question that Karl Rove, one of the - if not THE biggest fundraiser for Mitt Romney, is sitting there on the "fair and balanced" channel telling that network what to do with its coverage.  I mean, if you are still watching Fox "News" after this blatant display, I charge that you are simply not an objective person.

It isn't that we watch Rove and Fox humiliate themselves journalistically.  They do that every day, almost never this spectacularly.  What we need to think about is why we see it.

Conveniently, The Mountain has an opinion about this.  And some of the hunches I'm exploring here may not be exactly correct, but my years of reporting and police work tell me some things about this key segment of the clip.  I am kind of trusting my well-trained eyes.  I know a liar when I see one.  Spent years arresting them and putting them in jail.  Was trained in human behavior - called "kinesics" - when a person is lying.  And I think I see through Karl Rove here.

Karl IS incredulous.  Because I think he's sitting there on national teevee engaged in stealing the election and it didn't, for whatever reason, happen.  The fix was in.  And it didn't work.  And Karl is seen losing his mind.  This is one of those moments when a fly of truth gets through the screen and gets on teevee, but you have to really think about what you're seeing.

"We've had one instance when something was prematurely called," says Rove.  Why, yes, we have.  And it was in the 2000 election in Florida where the state was being called for Al Gore and... waitaminit - suddenly Fox "News" called the election for George W. Bush.  And we all saw how THAT played out.  The rogue known as "Bush's Brain" is still at work, wheedling and plotting behind the throne, a villainous Wormtongue playing at power.

"I have the chair of the Romney campaign in Ohio on the other end of the line," Rove splutters.  "And he's refreshing the page every few seconds."

Yes.  He goes to the 2000 election where - I believe - the presidency was stolen by his team.  And then he goes to Ohio, where a monkey is refreshing the official page that is supposed to tell them they won... But it didn't.

So, what I'm talking about is electronic vote tampering.  Here is a YouTube video of a Pennsylvania voter trying to cast his vote for Obama on an electronic voting machine and it keeps registering his support for Romney instead.
 

I don't trust electronic voting machines.  They can be tampered with relatively easily and they can - apparently - malfunction.  How interesting that this particular machine only malfunctioned in the race for president.  How can that be?

Well, in Ohio, for instance, partisan GOP secretaries of state like Ken Blackwell in 2004 FACED CHARGES of widespread computer voting fraud.  Interestingly, a key republican IT guru, Michael Connell, who was deposed in the case, never got to testify since he died when his Piper Saratoga crashed in 2008 when he was flying home to Ohio from D.C.  The case, without the key witness, was finally dismissed this year.

I believe that the GOP got away with stealing an election for at least the second time in Ohio in 2004.  And I think, as this former NSA analyst thinks, they've been doing it for a long time.

And I think that's the why I've been looking for.  I think that's why we saw Karl Rove losing his marbles live on teevee on election night.  Because the fix was in and SOMETHING went wrong.

And until there is a uniform voting process in our country that uses a verifiable paper trail on election day, I feel that electronic vote totals are untrustworthy.  Perhaps we ought to remove partisan hacks like Katharine Harris and Ken Blackwell and Jon Husted from the process of running state elections.  Yeah, that's the ticket!  Take the cookie-thieves out of the democracy cookie jar.

I tell ya, somebody oughtta put the grab on Karl Rove and inject him with some truth serum and see how that little pig squeals.  Chubby is up to something.

So, I'll bring this all home with a little Jon Stewart.  If you must watch teevee, the least you can do is sanitize yourself with Rachel Maddow (the smartest woman on teevee, remember) or you can shower off all the B.S. with Jon Stewart

Feel free to comment below and thanks for visiting.  Please feel free, if you think the writing is valuable, to pass along the link to friends. 

Shawn K. Inlow
Osceola Mills, Pa.






10 comments:

  1. Yeah, I see your point, but one YouTube video doesn't exactly seal the deal for me. I think it's possible that the Republican Party really did convince itself, through endless rhetoric, scare tactics, and closed-minded wishful thinking, that they would emerge victorious in the latest election cycle.

    I think that the powers that be in the Republican Party were able to convince many people who were hurting that Obama, and by extension Democrats, and liberal ideas beyond that, was the reason for their troubles. I think people need a scapegoat when things go sour, and I think the party shouting the loudest and pointing the biggest finger is the one that most people, even well intentioned intelligent people, gravitate towards.

    Maybe there was voter fraud, but I doubt it. I think a much more likely scenario is that ol' Karl drank a little too much of his own Kool-Aid, and a lot of people on the right followed suit. And I worry that the voter-fraud argument might simply be Blueberry Kool-Aid instead of Cherry.

    After all, what is trustworthy if you haven't seen it for yourself? Would a paper trail be any more proof of a vote? Just because you get a receipt that you can put in your pocket to prove to yourself that you voted doesn't mean you can count on your neighbor's being accurate, or that your vote was even counted in the first place. Can you believe we landed on the moon in 1969 just because NASA says we did? There's a reflector up there that you can bounce a laser off of, but I don't have any lasers, and that could have been set there by a robot! Is evolution just an excuse to eliminate God? Is there a War on Christmas? Who really shot Kennedy? How do we know the world is round if we haven't actually gone the whole way around it? You get my point.

    Some things, most things in fact, you have to take on evidence. If the Republicans were engaged in a vast voter-fraud conspiracy, wouldn't you think that the Republicans wouldn't have been served such a disdainful dish in November? And who's to say, by your argument, that the Democrats weren't responsible for fraud and that's why they won?

    I remember the voter-fraud issue with ACORN, and how people on the left and (more importantly) people without political affiliation decried that voter-fraud is so rare and statistically insignificant that it might as well not even exist at all. So I wouldn't be so hasty to postulate that Karl Rove is in the middle of a vast right-wing voter-fraud conspiracy.

    There's a political pendulum in this country, and I think it has accelerated with the 24-hour news cycle. To fill time, we now have to hear the crazies from both sides screaming at us every day and night, and passions are ignited with the slightest spark. The FOX News coverage we witnessed on election night NEVER would have surfaced in the 60's, when everyone HAD to tune in to Cronkite to find out what the hell was going on because you only had three channels, and you had to get your news from 6:30 to 7:00 because that was IT.

    Moreover, people now feel entitled to weigh in on myriad issues that aren't of any concern to them, and honestly they wouldn't know anything about if it weren't rammed down their throats every day. Therefore, you have people with no skin in the game weighing in on things they know absolutely nothing about and situations that they've never experienced. Abortion, Gay Rights, Gun Ownership, Immigration, and others all elicit deep emotional and sometimes violent responses from all of us, but in reality we almost NEVER have to deal with those issues in our daily lives.

    The political machine uses these issues to divide people, to distract them from things that do affect them because dealing with issues that do effect us can be really painful. I don't blame voter-fraud. I blame the fact that it's easier to point out problems and criticize than it is to develop solutions and compromise.

    And I'd vote for Jon Stewart if he'd run for office....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for weighing in. I'm not just pointing to one YouTube video. There was a federal lawsuit brought against Ken Blackwell for electronic voter fraud in which the key republican operative happened to die before he could testify. That case is interesting to read.

      In that case, the election results were alleged to have gone to a server in Kentucky where the votes were changed and sent back to officials in Ohio.

      And I point to a National Security Analyst who believes he's found a pattern of large scale electronic voter fraud. It's all in the hot links in the copy if you wanna read further.

      And your point is valid that one needs evidence. And I agree. There's no evidence here. I am pursuing - as I state - hunches. I believe the game was afoot but somehow it didn't pan out. What I saw was Karl Rove wigging out and wondered what could possibly explain that?

      We all used to vote on paper ballots that were put in locked containers and taken to a place where they were counted. If there was a challenge, you could look at every vote and count them again. With electronic voting, that's not necessarily the case. I believe Patton Township, in Centre County, has chosen not to use electronic voting machines and currently use a system that is verifiable. I think the whole country needs to do likewise.

      si

      Delete
    2. interesting to read? How bout the guy who"ODed" in the desert that got a 120 MPG outta his car?

      Delete
  2. Okay, today NO QUOTE! Nobody is listenig anyways. I cannot compare to my brother nor uncle in writing chops, but, thank you Shawn for fucking me off. Oh Rach you're (in blog fashion) fucked! Yeah Shawn, sorry this bitch is worth my swears! Ron Paul,In Jesus name amen. Sorry I still have election turrets. So holy shit here we go...turrets
    Everyone knows she’s an ugly bull-dike, so we’re not going to go there, except to say that it is worse for a woman to look like a man than for a man to look like a woman.

    I get that she’s smart. Great. Glenn Beck is smart. John Kerry is smart — way smarter than George Bush, at least — and no one gave a shit. They say Marilyn Monroe was smart, but no one really gave a shit, because it’s much better to look like Marilyn Monroe, who everyone remembers for that time she had to hold her dress down from blowing over her head and almost showing her pussy, than to be smart.

    But why does Rachel Maddow have to come off as such a snot-nosed brat? She has the same tone of voice and the same dumb, over-cheery smile, not to mention the glasses and haircut, as the teenage cashier in Starbucks who says when she rings you up, “did you know our coffee beans come from Sumatra, and the natives who picked them get paid $.02 per hour instead of $.01 like the assholes at Dunkin’ Donuts pay, ‘GLEAM!!’ (cheesy, idealistic smile) ?” No, I didn’t know that, Rachel Maddow. Shut the fuck up.”

    Being an intellectual in not intrinsically cool. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. The only cool intellectuals are the ones who are depressed and drink themselves to death. That is to say, like everything else, it’s only cool when you’re not actively trying to make it cool. Rachel Maddow is to intellectuality what Will Smith was to Hip Hop, when he was doing the no swear words kind of shit that was supposed to make rap OK with parents.

    It makes me cringe when I see Rachel Maddow’s doofy, smiling, chicklet-teeth having, pre-pubescent boy face on TV and she’s making some facetious remark which makes reference to current affairs, then looking around for a response, like that’s what normal people find funny, then — this is the worst part — people in the audience, and possibly those in the room with you as well, actually laugh, because, who wants to look stupid, right? It’s like watching someone’s middle-aged parents bob their head to “Gettin’ Jiggy With it” because they’re happy that at least it doesn’t have the word fuck in it.

    Please, Rachel Maddow, stop trying to be funny. And while you’re at it, stop being such a highfalutin bitch. Chris Kristofferson was a Rhodes scholar too, and he’s not a know-it-all, tomboy-next-door, bull-dike but still somewhat attractive, smirking goody-two-shoes.

    You could learn a lot from your colleague Lawrence O’Donnell. He looks like he stays up all night smoking cigarettes at his typewriter and getting pissed off at conservatives instead of funneling his penis-envy into making limp, barb-lessly derisive remarks while he sits on a baseball-bat sized dildo like you do.

    Again, I know you’re smart. But you’re like a little girl on her birthday who says when she opens her presents, “What the fuck — I asked for the Lydia Davis translation of Proust, not the Kilmartin-Moncrieff, dad. Are you retarded?” You’re right (I guess?), but — shut the fuck UP.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ever notice, Ryan, how the name calling starts when the logic fails?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Derogatory name-calling often occurs when someone has an emotional argument to make with little or no supporting logical argument.
      The emotional mind can often have a "mind of its own" or "emotional intelligence" which operates independently of the logical mind. When there is no logical argument to back up what the emotional mind is telling us, emotional outbursts such as name-calling often result. ie, Shut the fuck up Rachel Maddow.
      Most people who indulge in name-calling know that the label or name they choose to describe another individual is not factually accurate. The label is often regarded as a hyperbole or a metaphor which more accurately describes how the speaker feels about the other person than what the speaker actually thinks about the other person.

      Delete
    2. Ryan! It was YOUR name calling to which I was referring.

      Delete
    3. Did NOT intend to start a hate blog about Rachel Maddow! Quotes will resume on future posts!

      “In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
      ― Robert Frost

      Delete
    4. Yes Bob. I'm pretty sure I "busted my own balls" in the reply

      Delete
    5. What? Glenn Beck isn't smart...

      Delete

Now Hear THIS!!

Streampad