*****
MEANWHILE BACK ON THE RANCH...
A speech in DU Election Forum by DUer Althecat
*****US... election time is coming fast... first summer, an abundance of hurricanes and a president playing with his cactuses… and then come September/October it will hit us all in the face like the train wreck that we all know it will surely be.
And then before we have time to collect our thoughts, it will have happened again. Election Theft 2006.
At present the conventional wisdom among Democrats who think they lost fairly in 2004 (plus a bunch of those who thought 2006 was crooked too) is that the good guys cannot possibly lose in November 2006 with a President so unpopular, events in the real world playing so badly for the administration (The War and the Climate) and a GOP so out of tune with reality.
This is a mistake....
The combination of skillful media management (Karl Rove's true genius) combined with wide scale election theft is an unbeatable combination unless it is actively opposed at both a grass roots and central party committee level.
Meanwhile most of the grass roots and all but a tiny minority of party leadership are still on a planet where election integrity remains fully intact.
Lets for a moment suspend discussion of whether JFK Junior is right and 2004 was stolen. Rather lets simply assume that it was and then think what that means. Principally:
IF 2004 WAS STOLEN ---- IS IT REMOTELY POSSIBLE THAT A PLAN IS NOT NOW ALREADY UNDERWAY TO STEAL THE ELECTION IN 2006?
For those of us who have studied this subject inside and out we knew it was going to happen in 2004. We knew there would be vote theft and vote suppression. We knew it would be widespread and massive.
But we did not know exactly how it would be accomplished and we thought – MISTAKENLY – that if we proved it had happened people would now at last listen to us.
We watched it happen on the very night. Raw Story, DU (special mention TIA = "truthisall") and Scoop reported it. Live.
When we saw the exit polls stats we thought it was a smoking gun (as it was.) But we did not know how it happened. We were BETRAYED BY JOHN KERRY AND HIS SPINELESS ADVISORS.
Senator Barbara Boxer later believed in John Conyers fantastic efforts sufficiently to save Congress from the ultimate humiliation of having the result certified unopposed. But for all the coverage this generated in the media it might as well have been.
Now, thanks to Greg Palast, Fitrakis and Wasserman, Mark Crispin Miller, John Conyers and countless activists we know how the election was stolen. We know where it happened. When and to some extent who was involved. We can pinpoint the counties where it took place if necessary.
Last week RFK Jnr – following in the footsteps of Gore Vidal and several authors at Vanity Fair at least one of whom is more often known as right wing reactionary – reported yet again that it was not our lying eyes that deceived us but the talking heads on the TV.
So let me ask again.
IF 2004 WAS STOLEN ---- IS IT REMOTELY POSSIBLE THAT A PLAN IS NOT NOW ALREADY UNDERWAY TO STEAL THE ELECTION IN 2006?
Of course it isn't.
************I therefore present the following proto-theory on what the future holds for the US 2006 mid-term elections.
See this story on Lou Dobbs reporting of immigration matters.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0606/S00036.htm…& recall that Lou Dobbs also jumped on this report about Sequoia and Venezuela.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0606/S00012.htmDobbs is right to be concerned about the ownership of voting machine companies, we all are. But this story stinks. Finally the MSM is concerned about the ownership of voting machine companies… but not by the ownership by GOP stalwarts. But by the possible ownership by South American dictators.
There have always been rumours/stories about South American rigging of US elections circulating in the background since I was introduced to this subject. Now it seems there is proof.
And a bit of Government bungling to boot of supervision of these things it seems. This is
all too convenient.
But when read in light of Mark Crispin Miller's extraordinary findings in
Fooled Again it is positively disturbing. These stories create a very interesting nexus.
South Americans are not only flooding across the borders and stealing American jobs - they are also putting up oil prices (down in communist Venezeula) and using American money to buy voting machine companies and rig US elections.
This is Freeper fantasy par excellence. Of course they need to respond by stealing the election again themselves. The future of the republic is at stake.
Which brings me to some political analysis and how I now suspect the ELECTION THEFT 2006 game will be played.
***********Immigration (i.e. the political playing of the race card) was what was launched at *s big prime time speech last month.
Troops were sent to the border and Halliburton was given huge contracts to build concentration camps.
The immigration policy * adopted is classic "wedge politics". (Ironically this speech took place on the very day we were fixated on the prospect of Karl Rove's imminent indictment.)
In the game of politics – and I am by profession a political journalist here in NZ - immigration & playing the race card is in political terms the equivalent of playing the joker.
The political use of a race card to gain power to implement a fascist agenda is also what Hitler did. It is inherently dangerous... and it is inherently evil politics… but we live in an immoral world and it has been used to spectacular effect all over the world in recent years.
Recent elections in Australia, New Zealand, Holland and Austria all indicate that when done tastefully in a nation with a racist underbelly the race-card is the ultimate vote generator. It works a treat and confounds the punditocracy by the bucketful.
It has been played thrice in the last decade with spectacular effect in NZ politics including the most recent two elections in NZ where the card was played by a parachuted in neo-liberal economist who is presently the leader of the NZ equivalent of the Grand Old Party (if only it still was!!!).
This most recent NZ election – September last year - also saw:
- widespread allegations of US GOP political consultant involvement;
- the bizarre involvement of a Christian Right sect (the Exclusive Brethren who also recently backed Mel Martinez in Florirda) in an underground dirty tricks campaign;
- the involvement of Australian consultants who worked recently with the Tories in London when they too played a mild version of the race card (it failed).
In NZ our race-relations policy dominated election was marked by:
1. Huge volatility in political polling numbers (a spread of 15% in the week before the election)... sufficiently large much so that any result could have been demonstrably possible at the ballot box.
2. Huge gains for the National Party over their past performance...
3. An ambitious last minute run at the prize from the right... including a bid for an absolute majority (which under our proportional representation system – MMP – Mixed Member Proportional - was fortunately assured to fail.
Historical Note: NZ's electoral system is the same as Germany's which was specifically designed to counter the achievement of absolute majority by a fascist minority.)
************So lets apply this political meme to the current situation in the US.
Whether the playing race-card actually changes public opinion sufficiently or not is not the issue for the 2006 US elections.
When you have the ability to modify the count with some degree of subtlety what is important is creation of the political cover to justify your victory in the face of evidence to the contrary. In other words you need to confound the punditocracy and keep them confused.
The race card in NZ was effective but it did not actually result in victory for the National Party – but it did come close…. similarly an anti-immigration card failed in the most recent UK elections though again there was significant conservative traction from it. It did however work well for John Howard in the last Australian federal elections. (One downside of playing the race card is that it also mobilizes the opposition because they recognize fascism when they see it – not that it is particularly hard in the US these days.)
So while the race-card may not be able to deliver the GOP the house in 2006-2008 what it is indisputably capable of is creating a great deal of confusion over the issue of who is leading in the build up to the election.
I do not think Lou Dobbs is deliberately acting as a tool of right wing propaganda. This is far more subtle than that. And the fact that a mainstream commentator - generally thought of as somewhat kindly and a bit liberal - is potentially being co-opted in this fashion gives a very strong steer on the caliber of the opposition media strategising.
The management of public opinion has become an art and the interests that back the Bush Administration have control of both the message and the media.
Combined the memes in these two stories
1. IMMIGRATION:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0606/S00036.htm2. SEQUOIA:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0606/S00012.htmHave the potential to provide:
1. a) Justification for a sudden shift in apparent voting intentions between now and autumn (which you call fall).
and
b) Credible cover for the creation of huge poll volatility.
(i.e. this be the effect.... confirmed in the exit polls this time - but which will be kept under wraps this time most probably but I would think sophisticatedly manipulated to justify the result – they will not make that mistake again ...this in turn will justify even greater numbers of GOP votes being found nationwide in 2006 - and further undermining of the "conventional wisdom" of the usefulness of polling as a check method against election results.)
2. a message to the base of the GOP - the 1000s of activists who actually ran the dirty tricks campaigns and stuffed the ballot boxes in 2000 and 2004 who will be called upon to do it again in 2006 and 2008.
The beauty of this strategy is not only in that it can be used to blindside the media and the public. It will also blindside the Democratic Party.
It will do this precisely because this sort of fascist politics really does stand a chance of working.
When in September and October 2006 the published polls (and remember back to 2004, and who precisely is conducting many of these polls, and how easy they are to screw with these as soon as you start sampling different ratios of registered republicans and democrats) start going haywire the DNC and DLC will doubtless conclude that they have over-estimated the moral fibre of the electorate. They will conclude that the race card is working.
(ALSO NOTE WELL: The starting point for the pollsters in deciding on the sample sizes for the the 2006 polls will be the ballot stuffed numbers for the 2004 election which are still "officially" the best basis for making this assessment. i.e. This means that the polls will already be inherently biased towards overstating the GOP vote in all areas where votes were stolen in 2004.)
Then fearing they have again be out maneuvered Democratic Party leadership and candidates will respond by going all spineless as is their want - and just as Karl Rove is planning and expecting.
All the while behind the scenes the silent army of election stealers - who believe that a liberal corrupt society has handed over the keys of the electoral system to a South American dictator - will be preparing to steal the election from under their noses again.
Here endeth the rant.
Althecat