About Mark Crispin Miller's book

[ProSense]

Don't get "Fooled Again"
In his new book, Mark Crispin Miller tries to prove that Republicans rigged the 2004 election, but his evidence is thinner than a butterfly ballot.
By Farhad Manjoo

Nov. 14, 2005 | On Nov. 4, Mark Crispin Miller, the New York University media studies professor and longtime Bush critic, appeared on the lefty radio show "Democracy Now!" to promote his new book, "Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)." As part of an on-air debate with the investigative reporter Mark Hertsgaard, who recently criticized Miller's book in Mother Jones magazine, Miller let slip a dramatic piece of news about last year's Democratic nominee for the presidency. "On Friday, this last Friday night, I arranged to meet Senator Kerry at a fundraiser to give him a copy of my book," Miller said. "He told me he now thinks the election was stolen."

Now, this was big news. If what Miller said about Kerry was right, it would have signaled a momentous shift in thinking for the senator. For a year now, partisans on the left who say that Bush stole last year's presidential race have had a hard time making their claim stick precisely because Kerry, the man they allege was the main victim of the fraud, had so quickly conceded the election and so thoroughly ignored any suggestion that it had been rigged. But if Kerry now thought that these people were right -- if Kerry now believed Bush didn't actually win the race -- well, that would change everything. Suddenly the year-long online barrage of half-baked theories and misreported election data that some people say proves a massive, successful Republican conspiracy to install Bush in the White House would have found a very prominent, aggrieved backer, someone to finally make the case to the world that Americans had been cheated of their rightful president.


snip...

I say that Miller claims to prove this because that's pretty much all he does. In his introduction, Miller promises to prove that Republicans rigged the race, and then at some point in the middle of the book he begins talking like he already has, and the reader is left to leaf through the volume in a daze, wondering if perhaps some kind of typesetting or bookbinding error caused the explosive section of Miller's tome to be left out of this one copy. But not so; my book is intact, and though I searched the contents, the index and the voluminous endnotes, I found no proof of Miller's theory. Like his claim that Kerry now believes he was robbed, Miller's many suggestions of fraud dissolve under close scrutiny. By the end, the only fraud you're sure of is the one perpetrated upon you, the reader, into bearing with this book.

In an ideal world, one wouldn't feel compelled to review -- nor to say much of anything about -- a book like "Fooled Again." In an ideal world, books like these -- vacuous, tendentious collections of pseudo-journalism that promise 10 times as much in their titles as they deliver between the covers -- would die quietly off in the media distance, ignored by everyone, inciting nobody, collecting dust and a heap of embarrassment for their overheated authors.


more...

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/11/14/miller /


If this book is all the proof needed, why the drama about what Kerry said? Proof is more than saying Kerry told him so personally.

[punpirate]

1. Miller has responded to this article...

... more detail here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=5432845

Miller's point in mentioning Kerry's latest remark was not to "prove" that it happened, but to indicate Kerry had his suspicions, as well, even though he did not act on them (as has been mentioned many times before, on the advice of advisors).

Manjoo, for what it's worth, is simply one of those who doesn't believe it can happen. There are lots of people who don't, or believe that if it happens, election fraud doesn't exert enough influence to change the will of the people.

Cheers.

[ProSense]

2. I've seen the response!

The rest of the world is waiting for proof. Not a debate about who said what?

[Junkdrawer]

3. The very thing most of us complain about is that...

the voting machines leave an insufficient audit trail.

Soooo....

The industry and it's apologists say: "Until you PROVE that an election was stolen, we won't change our procedures."

Can you see the cynicism in that stance? :shrug:

[CatWoman]

4. HA!!

[ProSense]

6. Election reform

is not dependent on proving the election was stolen. The GAO report and Conyer's report, which say nothing about a stolen election, are enough to effect change. Look at recent problems in CA and OH---plenty on which to base change. Proving Bush stole the election is a completely different matter.

[punpirate]

7. This is the problem when the votes are counted...

... electronically. You're not going to have the kind of proof that existed in the past--there's no secondary audit, i.e., paper to back up the electronic files. That's fundamental to the issue.

Add in voter suppression (which is well-documented in Ohio, and a little less so in Florida the same year), the statistical anomalies, the fussing with voting tabulators (see, particularly, the business with Triad), the lack of transparency (for example, the lockdown of the counting facility in Warren County on a specious claim the FBI had warned of terrorism) and there's strong suspicion. Very strong.

Add in that voting procedure reform failed in Ohio only a year after the problems in Ohio (after polls a week before the vote showed strong favorability), and there's further grounds for suspicion.

If you're looking for the sort of proof that could be taken into court, that requires someone to spill the beans. Not likely to happen. If you're looking for enough evidence to warrant drastic reconsideration of the methods of voting and counting, that already exists. And, as long as those conditions are not changed, there will always be the opportunity for election theft which cannot be detected, and will not be the sort of proof you seem to require.

TruthIsAll has done statistical analyses six ways to Sunday on the 2004 election and its exit polls, and keeps coming up with the same answer--something was jiggered. Without real ballots, that's the closest you're going to come to proof. That's the whole point. There's nothing to audit but the electrons stored in the memory card.

Cheers.

[peacetalksforall]

5. Isn't this reviewer always going after anyone who addresses our vote?

Maybe he just doesn't like footnotes. Maybe he just doesn't read footnotes?

He has a lot of company. All of CNN, FOX, CBS, ABC, and the NBCs say there isn't a story there,

I would be happy as a child if Cheney and George and their regime could be brought down as a result of 500,000 citizens waking up and educating 1 million other citizens to the fact that their votes have been privatized and are now in the hands of Republicans and Republican networks since they own the software, hardware, technicians who fix things, and their right wing news media partners who pay for, own, and can manipulate exit polling data that can be synchronized with Republican machine controlled tallies.

[ProSense]

8. Interesting comments

in this thread

[marions ghost]

9. what IS the underlying agenda of this Manjoo guy?

...such a strident attempt to discredit Miller --ya gotta ask what his motives are. Manjoo's attempt to play up the Kerry-Miller comments is a pretty obvious deflection from the real issues.

Personally I think Kerry (and the Dems) knew the election was stolen in November 2004. The climate after the election was so bizarre, with a virtual blackout on any discussion of the exit poll anomalies in the media, etc. I don't think Kerry could have been successful in protesting the election as stolen, then or now. Far from Mangoo's assertion that "it would have changed everything" if he had...it would have changed nothing. I think Kerry chose to hunker down and continue his work in the Senate because he clearly saw that becoming the poster boy for election fraud would be a brutally thankless task, given the widespread denial and irrational faith in Der Chimp at the time.

Kerry's saying this to Miller was nothing more than acceptance of the fact of widespread election theft IMO. Most career politicians, as Mark C. Miller said in the interview, are "materially and emotionally invested in the status quo" and will not spend large amounts of time and resources in confronting the election problems. The problems are too big and really it should NOT be the candidate's job. We are all disappointed that Kerry didn't do more in Ohio to contest, but I think he judged that it wasn't going to be productive.

I saw this same thing happen in an election at state level. It was obvious to many close to it that the election was heavily manipulated. Yet neither the Democratic party nor the candidate contested. It was just too much of an uphill climb after the massive efforts spent on the campaign. I think that's how Kerry viewed it. Our system really is that corrupt. There's no incentive to clean up the system.

[CHIMO]

10. Media Matters with Bob McChesney

Our guest this week is Mark Crispin Miller, professor at New York University, discussing his latest book "Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)".

http://www.will.uiuc.edu/am/mediamatters/

RealAudio
http://rms01.cites.uiuc.edu/ramgen/will/archives/mediamatters051120.rm

MP3
http://www.will.uiuc.edu/willmp3/mediamatters051120.mp3

Listen to the author.