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The concept that you can't have a conspiracy of a certain size because people talk sounds good on its face. Until you realize the magnitude of the conspiracy of silence, sleight of hand, lies and obfuscation that led us to war with Iraq, for example. A few people on the periphery speak out, but have you heard Perle or Wolfowitz or Condi Rice acknowledging, "yeah, we were full of shit but we wanted to take out Saddam so we lied"?
It's not unreasonable to believe that the chief architects of this fraud are few, and are true believers who will never admit their complicity.
But beyond discussing whether the election was "stolen" and arguing about statistics is the fundamental question: Do we ALL have the right to a fair, above board, and transparent election process?
Yes.
And just as in most other areas, even the perception of conflict of interest should be frowned upon. And we should always be able to go back and check our math.
So arguing about who has the tin foil hats avoids the real issue. The election process is under attack.
Here's what we have:
Secretaries of State who are party operatives and who issue directives that are blatantly partisan and often illegal, but always "err" on the side of limiting voting.
People who were discouraged from voting because there weren't enough machines, although there were warehouses full of them that weren't deployed.
People caught jamming get out the vote phone lines.
People caught pasting over one candidate's "dots" and filling in for another candidate
People caught altering other people's absentee ballots
People caught shredding other people's registration cards
People caught avoiding the legally mandated recount by pre-counting districts instead of random samples
etc.
And we have an influx of voting machines that don't allow us to recount at all. HAVA mandated the ability to recount, and we find later that Diebold machines, for example, have printers already installed - that they didn't tell anyone about!! And then they discourage anyone from buy peripheral printers. Now explain to me why any company would hide features of their product and then discourage the purchase of other products they carry?
In the meantime, Florida has now, in direct violation of HAVA, declared it illegal to try to recount votes on DVMs. Why? And how do they get away with it?
Can't we, at a minimum, agree that our rights as voters should not be abridged, and we should be able to verify the vote counts?
It's as if Manjoo's saying that it's okay to mess with elections as long as you muddy it up enough that we can't "prove" the other guy won. But if we can't recount, and we discredit exit polls, we can never prove anything. So are our elections doomed?
Others have said it before me. It doesn't matter whether the election was "stolen", and RFK Jr. doesn't say it was. He says there were too many discrepancies, too much manipulation, too little transparency, and we deserve more.
We deserve more.
And this sort of bs "analysis", this demand that we "prove" Kerry actually won or simply allow this behavior to go on, is frightening in its cynicism and naivete.
