*sigh*

[ravan]

I read an article today about the election, and the statistical odds of bush winning the actual count without fraud given the exit polls. You have a better chance of winning the fucking lottery. The mainstream press is ignoring it, the rethuglicans are saying it's just 'sour grapes'. Fuck.

We have now had three elections (200, 2002, 2004) with mounting evidence of major fraud and/or malfeasance by election officials and election equipment vendors, and only the "conspiracy theorists" and "sore loser liberals" give a damn?? What the fuck is happening in my country? Why can't any of us say or do anything to fix this shit? Why are they getting away with it? Why can't I do anything to stop it?

This shit is seriously scaring the crap out of me. I can't ignore it, or crawl into some nice safe little consumer fantasy like so many others. It really bothers me, because I care, about real freedom, the constitution, and the future.

At least Bin Laden and his band of thugs are blatant, and do shit that we can recognize as an attack and deal with the damage. But the erosion of the basic principals of our nation from within, without any meaningful protest, makes your garden variety terrorist acts seem almost benign.

I am beginning to believe that 9/11 was allowed to happen (maybe even encouraged) by the rethuglicans, for political gain. I guess I've joined the tinfoil hat brigade. Or at least the tinfoil lined passport case brigade...

Comments

[jemyl.livejournal.com]

"Translation: you're in the minority of smart people. Shut up for your own good. Since most people don't see the wrong, it's not really there."

Bullshit! That is a wrong translation. You ARE in the minority of smart people. You do see the wrongs. There is no thought on my part that they are all not really there. I just think it is necessary to document them very thoroughly. I also see you as closing your mind completely and taking an extremist position when an open mind and a somewhat, but definitely not totally, less extreme position would get you closer to the truth. There have always been fixed elections. I just don't think that this one was as fixed as you would like it to have been. In your own family at least four previous liberals were so turned off by John Kerry that they voted for Bush. The problem this time was that the choice was to find the lesser of two evils and many people, myself included, decided that four years of Bush while the Democrats got their act together and found someone we COULD vote for was better than a possible eight years of Kerry. Social programs were going to be cut regardless. Troops were going to be in Iraq, regardless too. Sorry, but I saw John Kerry as an oportunistic lying jerk who would do just as he pleased, and his record was not very good, once he got the job.

As for the accuracy of exit polls, I need only point to the election of Harry Truman. As for Fox News, I don't listen to them either and I always figure the press to be biased. The thing to do is to find biases both ways and interpolate.

I have never been a sheep and you know it. I question EVERYTHING and don't trust ANY positician completely. I do, however, trust the system as it has shown itself, time and again, to work. At the same time, I am a realist and get that this country, for good or bad, does run on electricity and oil products. WMD's? Shit! While our leaders postured and threatened Sadam had time to get rid of three countries worth of WMD's. I still like and believe one of my very smart friends who quipped; "The reason Bush believed there were WMD's is because he knows we sold them the damned things!"

I hate war, all war. I still am glad that we are fighting in Iraq instead of in New York and I do believe that is the choice with these clowns. I agree about Bush beoming a martyr and about Cheney. I do not like or trust Cheney.

I admire your conviction, though I am not sure it is well placed just yet. This country will always need dissidents. That is not the tin foil fringe. That is just good government and good citizenship. Just keep a somewhat open mind, check your sources carefully and, whatever you do, don't just walk away in disgust. Bush and company know that they didn't carry the intellectuals except for Kerry's stupidity in trying to please everyone. That probably means that they will not have a Republican congress after the 2006 elections unless they walk a fine line. Keep the line very fine. Work to get the elections IN OUR COUNTRY to be flawless, if that is possible.

We can agree to disagree. I do, however, enjoy that you always make me think. So does Stan, by the way, and with the almost exact opposite view. I am somewhere in between and open to both viewpoints as possilby valid, depending on the situation. Just be careful, as I also must do, that you do not throw that baby out with the name catagorization bathwater. There are both Republicans and Democrats who do not fit your stereotypes, just as all Christians are not Fundies and all Wiccans are not Devil worshipping black witches out to rule the world by casting evil spells on everyone. (Yes, I had someone describe Wiccan that way. What utter tripe!)

Hmmmm, I still think we should all just step off of the world and find a cave where we can all just eat chocolate for the next four or so years. LOL NOT serious on that one.

[ravan.livejournal.com]

The problem this time was that the choice was to find the lesser of two evils and many people, myself included, decided that four years of Bush while the Democrats got their act together and found someone we COULD vote for was better than a possible eight years of Kerry.

The problem with 4 more years of Bush is what he is doing to the judiciary, and the budget, with a lapdog congress to assist him. Yes, Kerry was the lesser of two evils in many ways. I wanted Dean, personally. But Kerry doesn't lie any more than Bush, and he flip-flops less, when you actually look at the records.

John Kerry wouldn't appoint so-called "strict constructionists" to the federal bench, including the supreme court. Kerry wouldn't appoint anti-gay, anti-civil-rights, anti-choice activist judges to the federal bench.

Nobody likes abortion, but that right to chose what to do with your own life and body is too precious to turn over to some bible thumping liars who wears their religion on their sleeves when it suits them, and who would make their supposed savior furious, IMO. Kerry wouldn't have pandered to people who value fetus's so much that they would trample on doctor patient priviledge, curtail a womans right to chose the use to which her body is put, and even support giving "religious" pharmacists the right to make medical decisions for women by refusing to fill their prescriptions for birth control, regardless of why they need it, yet have no regard for the living children. The "no child left behind" thing is really "no child really educated".

Kerry wouldn't be talking about an "ownership society" where the only owners happen to be big corporations. Kerry doesn't call clearcutting "conservation". Kerry wouldn't demand that government science actually toe an ideological line.

Dean even had good marks from the NRA.

[weofodthignen]

On the exit polls--there was even an AP story not long ago about how woefully inaccurate the exit polls have been in the last 3 elections. The story emphasized Republicans refusing to answer the pollsters, which is a new one on me. But apparently the networks had to withdraw judgments about who had won in all 3 elections, and there is apparently general consternation there that the exit poll system has broken down.

I will not comment on the argument that 4 more years of Bush could in any way, shape or form be seen as the lesser of two evils.

I will, however, comment on the notion that New York and California are somehow "out there." Not only did California recently elect a Republican governor after firing a Democratic one--and California has always had a large number of solidly Republican voters, Berkeley does not define the whole state any more than Greenwich Village defines New York State--but I refer you to all the cute "red and blue" maps. Have a look at Minnesota and Wisconsin, for a start. The states that voted for Kerry are not just on the "fringes" on the two coasts--even if it were advisable to marginalize huge states like California and New York in the first place.

That's the propaganda of an anti-democratic leadership.

Better yet, look at one of the many maps that broke it down by county. The country is divided right down to that level--below it in some places. My own county went 66% for Kerry. Some other urban counties in this state went 70% for Bush. The "other side" is your neighbors. Everywhere except possibly Utah. Couldn't you tell that from the yard-sign battle? That was what the pre-election statistical dead heat in the polls was all about. America is deepky and fundamentally divided and it is not a geographical division, or even a Xian/immoralist division as the Republican propaganda machine would like to depict it.

Nor is it an intellectual/non-intellectual division. Intellectuals voted both ways. There are right-wing intellectuals, too, you know . . . and people who made the same decision about "security" that you evidently did . . . and all those union members who voted for Kerry out of party loyalty, are you going to argue they are of higher average intellect than the workers who went for Bush?

M

[weofodthignen]

Oh by the way, I forgot to add--how Republican was Roosevelt? The US has not had a large amount of experience being at war. Even WW2 was a short experience for Americans, with only brief rationing and only one or 2 attacks on American soil after the initial experience of Pearl Harbor. And the response to Pearl Harbor and the way WW2 was conducted were so different--sorry, I just cannot buy the argument that this administration's response to 9-11 is "just the way things are in wartime" or even that it is an effective response. Just as I am not impressed with the general public's difference in attitude toward authority this time around after the much better showing as an informed citizenry that they made during the Vietnam conflict. If we are to learn lessons from history--which by the way I think is a simplistic way of looking at history--then by both those examples, the current experiment in fascism is a new way of doing things.

M