Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Recommended Reading

Here's what I think is an important article by Frank Rich. His thesis, with which I agree, is that a lot of the talk about "moral values" in this country is bogus, or at least subordinated to profit. Here's Rich quoting Thomas Frank, the author of What's the Matter With Kansas?, a best-selling consideration of the sensibilities of the so-called blue and red states...

"Values," Mr. Frank writes, "always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won." Under this perennial "trick," as he calls it, Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force the culture industry "to clean up its act" - until the votes are counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting capital gains and estate taxes. Mr. Murdoch and his fellow cultural barons - from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing C.E.O. of Viacom, to Richard Parsons, the Republican C.E.O. of Time Warner, to Jeffrey Immelt, the Bush-contributing C.E.O. of G.E. (NBC Universal) - are about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious entertainment. It's they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, who actually set the cultural agenda Gary Bauer and company say they despise.

Anyway, read the whole article. I think I've configured the link so you can read it even if you haven't registered over at The New York Times.

• Posted at 9:57 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Timothy Noah rebuts an article that argues we should not rid ourselves of the Electoral College. As I mentioned before we knew who won, I think the Electoral College is a terrible idea with no valid arguments in its favor.

• Posted at 4:24 PM · LINK

Today's Political Rant

I continue to receive 10-20 e-mails a day alerting me to "evidence" that George W. Bush stole the recent election via massive irregularities, primarily in Florida and Ohio. Keith Olbermann has apparently been flogging the issue on his MSNBC show and I caught one segment which, taken on its own, made a semi-convincing case that much was amiss. This article in Salon makes a semi-convincing case, I think, that the kind of anomalies noted by Olbermann and others are just run-of-the-mill, easily-explainable screw-ups...and some of them aren't even that. So far, it all strikes me as a lot of anecdotal, arguable evidence.

Please don't send me any more articles or links about this. I agree that it's very important. I don't agree that I have the energy to study it all and arrive at a serious conclusion, or that it matters if I do. I also don't think it's possible to convince a Republican administration to do anything about possible vote fraud by Republicans, nor do I think you can convince any significant number of Republicans that their guy didn't get in, fair and square. About all it can do is make Democrats madder...which, I dunno, may have some value.

A number of things do interest me about this, one being how "certain" some people are that the election was or was not fair, depending on who they wanted to see win. It makes you wonder how fair any jury trial can be, when so many people seem to lack the capacity to see the facts in any light but for the one that yields the conclusion they wish to reach.

Another is that we now have another one of those "facts" that will never die, no matter what. Back in 1960, there was a quote that made the rounds. It came from Richard Daley, who was then the mayor of Chicago, and it was reported more or less like this. The polls had Kennedy and Nixon running neck-and-neck for the electoral votes of Illinois and supposedly, late on Election Day, Daley phoned J.F.K. and said, "With a little bit of luck, and the help of a few close friends, you're going to carry Illinois." Kennedy did — and the vote totals in that state seemed suspicious, though perhaps not as odd as Nixon partisans later insisted. In any case, the Daley quote was taken as a prima facie admission that he had somehow manipulated the count.

I never thought the quote was as damning as some made it out to be...and I've also wondered about its authenticity. Just how did a private conversation between these two people become public? Do we think either man was dumb enough to allow a reporter to listen in on a discussion of how they'd rigged a presidential election? And if so, was it reported verbatim? Nevertheless, it's a widely-accepted part of history, and a lot of folks take it as proven fact that Daley arranged for Kennedy to steal the presidency. (It's also widely-accepted that Nixon was noble enough to not contest the result — a point raised by pundits when Gore conceded in 2000 and again recently when Kerry gave up. And that seems to be demonstrably untrue.)

In the same category as the Daley quote, we now have the 2003 line from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc., that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Actually, it's about as arguably damning as what Daley supposedly said, but O'Dell wrote it in a fund-raising letter so its veracity and exact wordage are not in doubt. That the head of the company that was making the voting machines should pen such words strikes me as foolish but it's not an admission of rigging. Nevertheless, twenty years from now, you'll be at a party, someone will mention the 2004 presidential election and someone else will say, "Oh, yeah...the one Bush stole. The guy who made the voting machines even admitted it."

The last thing that interests me about all this is that an awful lot of the debunking of the charge that Bush stole the election is coming from so-called "Liberal" sites like Salon, and a series over on Slate. Matter of fact, I read a fair number of Liberal and Conservative political sites and most of the reasoned, substantive debunkings are on Liberal sites. The Conservative sites are kind of addressing the issue with the attitude of, "You lost, stop whining, shut up." That alone convinces me we may all be in for a pretty rocky four years.

• Posted at 2:11 PM · LINK

No Great Surprise

The London production of The Producers — starring Nathan Lane on short notice — seems to be a smash.

• Posted at 7:44 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

For those of you who are getting bombarded with the idea that most of America is now "red states," here's an entry from a blogger who helps to put things in perspective.

• Posted at 7:33 AM · LINK