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PRISON INMATES use the phrase "turned out" to describe a new prisoner's status immediately following his first anal rape. Such assaults, especially of the un-lubricated variety, frequently leave the victim's rectum bulging and prolapsed, inside out. Intense shame and humiliation combine with excruciating pain to induce total submission on the part of the victim to the will of the dominator. So now you know, as Paul Harvey might say, the rest of the story.
Folks, yer old pal Jerky regrets to inform you that the nation's corporate media have well and duly been turned out. And while it could legitimately be argued that this has always been the case, the collective performance of the nation's news media since Election Day 2004 has been the televised equivalent of a mass Republican salad-tossing. You would have been hard pressed to hear anything about the myriad irregularities at the polls on Tuesday over the sound of all that sucking and slurping.
Because most people already understand that Fox News isn't really a news channel so much as the propaganda arm of the Republican party, yer old pal Jerky has restricted his analysis to the ostensibly "liberal biased" CNN. All of the following examples were culled during two days, November 2nd and 3rd.
Let's start with something many of you will probably think of as inconsequential, perhaps even paranoid: the red/blue map of the USA used by CNN's commentators throughout Election Day. The map was, to say the least, geographically incorrect. Tilted backwards with an exaggerated mid-section, it resembled nothing so much as a scarlet kettle with a little blue froth boiling over on the top right, and a thin smear of blue dribbling down the left. For the graphic geniuses at CNN, the value of a vote is apparently proportional to the size of the voter's back yard.
On Concession Day, yer old pal Jerky crawled out of his bedroom and turned on the TV to see if the previous night's reversal of fortunes had been, in reality, a particularly shitty nightmare. I flicked on CNN, and the first thing I saw was one of those station identification spots they do, featuring their trademarked motto, "Trust CNN." Only this time, it was different. This time, between the word "Trust", which zoomed across the screen, and the word "CNN", which also zoomed across the screen, an image of Preznit Dubya had been inserted, zooming from the bottom to the top of the screen. The subliminal message was, to yer old pal Jerky's febrile mind, quite obvious: "Trust Bush (brought to you by CNN)."
Disgusted, I headed for the shitter to purge my bladder and divest my bowels of a particularly nasty, booze-loosened load. Upon returning to the living room, I was treated to the insufferably obsequious Jeff Greenfield waxing soporific about the innate goodness of the people who live in the heartland of the Homeland. An obvious reaction to the previous night's exit poll revelation that many voters based their choice on "moral values", Greenfield's editorial soliloquy was entitled: "The Value of Values."
Funny how we're all supposed to believe that exit polling gave us an accurate indicator of why people voted, but not who they voted for. And funny how, in both cases, this conflicting revisionism fell in line with the conservative movement agenda.
For the next few hours, every glance at the screen added more examples to yer old pal Jerky's list. Even the deaf were not spared the propaganda, as the story title graphics, positioned just above the news crawl at the bottom of the screen, heralded the Triumph of the Will of the People.
A story about Bush's "historic win" was entitled MAN WITH A MANDATE. Never mind that his tainted victory was achieved with the slimmest percentage margin ever taken by any incumbent president. The next piece, about the White House's strutting glee at Kerry's decision to concede, was simply entitled: A DREAM.
Another story, this one about Dubya's decisive drubbing of Kerry, was entitled WINNER WITHOUT A DOUBT. The bimbo anchorette (was it Limbaugh's new squeeze? I forget) was giddier than a brunette in a shampoo commercial as she relayed the vitally important information that Bush had received the most votes of any presidential candidate in history! That Kerry received the second most votes of any candidate in history was not deemed worthy of mention.
As for what to make of the story entitled NOBODY KNOWS NUTHIN', yer old pal Jerky is inclined to think it was a casual and superfluous cruelty, a deliberate rubbing of shit into the psychic wounds of the powerless, over-informed, dissenting minority.
Soon thereafter, the effeminately pompous and infinitely self-absorbed Aaron Brown launched into a Newsnight segment by asking the following three questions, one after the other:
1. "Arianna, where did the Democrats go wrong?"
2. "Will, where did the Democrats go wrong?"
3. "Jim, where did the Democrats go wrong?"
The consensus answer was that the Democrats had "gone wrong" by failing to address the issue of… morality. CNN has been hammering this point ever since, pushing the idea that people simply don't care about the illegal and murderous war in Iraq. They don't care about a massive upward redistribution of wealth dragging millions of people into poverty. They don't care about this administration's cronies raking in billions of blood-soaked tax dollars into their offshore bank accounts. They only thing people care about is… (wait for it)… MORAL VALUES!
Of course, CNN weren't the only ones furiously knitting pajamas for the Naked Emperor. The inky fingers crowd also got in on the act. ABC News ran an AP report on how the majority of Americans were "relieved" by the "decisive" election, and "hopeful" about the next four years. "Voters took comfort from an election that wasn't tied up in the courts as in 2000," the unsigned article posits. A photograph of Bush framed by a giant stained glass window illustrates the point.
Shoring up the perception of Bush's newfound legitimacy wasn't the only game in town. Conservative columnists also got busy gloating, re-writing history, and laying the foundations for the stolen elections of tomorrow.
Some particularly egregious examples include the once-respectable Christopher Hitchens, who wandered into Lewis Carroll territory by penning a whisky-pickled smarm-fest in which he preposterously declares Bush's victory a "triumph for secularism", and Peggy Noonan's ridiculous post-election screed, entitled "Savor".
Conservative reaction to the increasingly widespread claims of Republican electoral fraud has mostly consisted of ridicule, or dead silence. But the disparity between exit polls and the final vote tally caused GOP political fixer Dick Morris to concoct a conspiracy theory of his own. In a column entitled "Those faulty exit polls were sabotage", Morris writes: "Next to the forged documents that sent CBS on a jihad against Bush's National Guard service and the planned 60 Minutes ambush over the so-called missing explosives two days before the polls opened, the possibility of biased exit polling, deliberately manipulated to try to chill the Bush turnout, must be seriously considered."
I urge every Daily Dirt reader to read Morris's piece in its entirety. It is a truly spectacular example of political judo. In one of the boldest attempts at reversal yer old pal Jerky has ever seen, Morris points out the elephant in the living room, and calls it a donkey. He does this because, being a knowledgeable political insider, he understands the truth about exit polls. He even admits to this truth, straight up: "Exit polls are almost never wrong. … So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries."
This is true. And yet, despite his acknowledgement, Morris's explanation for the vast gap between exit poll results and the official vote count is to cry sabotage. Not sabotage of the voting machines, mind you; nor of the unsupervised counting that went on behind closed doors, away from the prying eyes of journalists, sometimes under cover of non-existent Homeland Security edict. No... According to Morris, it was the exit polls, themselves, that were sabotaged!
Just imagine it… hundreds of exit poll workers at literally thousands of voting locations spread all across the nation, coordinating a heinous and intricate plot "to dampen Bush turnout in the Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones by conveying the impression that the president's candidacy was a lost cause." What with it's posing such a grave threat to Republican legitimacy, is it any wonder that RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie wants to abandon the practice of exit polling, altogether?
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