100 Things About The Election, Part XI

The continuing series of things I noticed during and after Election Day that I considered important. In no particular order...

84. Jim Geraghty at Kerry Spot did a fabulous job providing me and countless others with material throughout the election, and he's continuing to do so after taking a vacation following the election (now that was confidence about there being no repeat of 2000). Here he notes the continuing Democratic conspiracy theories about the election, and mentions the solid reporting of Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, who debunked the tripe being put forth by uber-idiot Keith Olbermann, formerly a brilliant Sportscenter host and now a pompous blowhard with lower ratings than test patterns...

Olbermann, however, really made a Dan Rather of himself last week.

He never directly charged that Republicans stole the election or demanded that Karl Rove should be picked up for questioning by the U.N. But for 15 minutes on Monday, Olbermann pointed to a "small but blood-curdling group of reports of voting irregularities and possible fraud" from across the country, topped it with some vague partisan innuendo from Democrat Congressman John Conyers, and acted like he deserved a Peabody Award for Civic Journalism.

On Tuesday I checked out some of Olbermann's claims. Using a high-tech personal communication device professional journalists refer to as a "telephone," I called an elections bureau person in Cuyahoga County, Ohio (greater Cleveland), where, as Olbermann pointed out, 93,000 extra votes had been inexplicably cast Nov. 2.

It turns out the votes were "a computer anomaly" that didn't affect or reflect the official vote count. And those 18,472 votes Olbermann said were counted in Fairview Park, a Cleveland suburb that had only 13,342 registered voters? Absentee ballots from many precincts had been grouped together by the computer and credited to Fairview Park, where 8,421 voted.

But what about Florida, the Vote-Fraud State?

Olbermann had made a big sinister deal about 29 counties whose registered voters were predominantly Democrat "suddenly" voting "overwhelmingly for Mr. Bush." He slyly left the impression that massive vote-stealing could have been perpetrated by ballot tabulating companies like Diebold, whose bosses were known Bush allies.

I called Baker County, Fla., Olbermann's first example. Yes, twanged the cheery election lady, 69 percent of voters in her rural county on the Georgia border are registered Democrat. Yes, "Mr. Boosh" got 78 percent of the vote and trounced Kerry, 7,738 to 2,180.

This was nothing new or untoward, she said. Folks in Florida's Panhandle are conservative, especially on social and moral issues. They mostly register as Democrats and vote that way on local issues, but in national and state elections, they go Republican. Been doing so for years.

I heard the same explanation from election ladies in the tiny and large counties of Calhoun, Lafayette, Escambia, Highland and Liberty, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by as much as 9 to 1. Yet Bush beat Kerry in every one.

If they had cared, Olbermann and the producers of "Countdown" could have discovered these facts before they began flogging their sloppy Internet-spawned conspiracy Monday and Tueday nights. Non-Republican journalists on Salon.com and Slate.com. had no trouble explaining/debunking it. Nor did bloggers.

By Wednesday, Olbermann's fever had cooled. But he had abandoned the Florida conspiracy angle, explained Cleveland's oddities and mostly was yukking it up about a Unilect computer that ate 4,000 votes in North Carolina.

Still, he and his guest enabler from the grownup world of journalism, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, were concerned about the wussiness of the news media. Why had no major print or electronic outlet pursued this shameful story?

I don't know, boys. Maybe it's because before they start making wild charges of "vote fraud," real journalists pick up a telephone.

O'Reilly could probably run a one-hour episode where he did nothing more than comb his hair, and still garner higher ratings than Olbermann. Maybe this explains why. Of course, Olbermann will probably get hired by 60 Minutes very soon.

85. Kerry had $15 million still in the bank??? What's he saving it for, hair care products?

86. Kerry Spot points us to this bit by Andrew Ian Dodge, which notes that Bush increased his share of votes among the following constiuencies: African-Americans, Whites, Hispanics, Married People, Unmarried People, Union Members, Gun Owners, Jews, Catholics, Republicans, Democrats, Men, Women, and anyone over 30. Well, at least Kerry... um... we'll think of something.

87. Seriously, these people need help.

Guess what? I feel no need to apologize to the rest of the world for anything. I live in the greatest country on Earth, and I won't apologize for that. We followed our system and elected our leader -- not their leader, our leader. Their opinions are their opinions. If they want to have input into who our leader is, stand in line to immigrate, get qualified for citizenship, become a citizen, register to vote, and then vote. My folks did that. So did a lot of other people.

If you're not a citizen, we don't owe an apology to you. I don't expect France or Germany or Russia to get down on their knees and beg for forgiveness for helping Saddam steal money from the corrupt Oil-for-Food program that was later used to finance terrorists, particularly the suicide bombers in the West Bank. Maybe they should be apologizing to Isreal. But I'm not going to hold my breath.

Back to the point. I am sick of the liberal mentality that leads idiots like this to conclude that they owe someone an apology because they or their country chose a different option than someone else wanted. That's a fact of life -- people disagree on things. You don't owe someone an apology for expressing your belief and making your choice. That does not visit an injury on the other party. I'm also guessing that at least half of the 57 million who voted with you don't feel the need to say sorry, so try not speak on their behalf either.

88. And speaking of help... the therapists are available. In Wisconsin and Florida, they're helping Kerry supporters to recover and get back to apologizing to the mailman for receiving mail, or whetever they do in real life. I think the "PEST" acronym for the syndrome pretty well describes these people.

89. This post at Kerry Spot summarizes some of the foot-stomping idiocy from the Left that I never got a chance to previously read. My personal favortie is this open letter to the Red Staes from the Blue States, possibly tongue -in-cheek, over at The Register...

With hard work and superb organization, you have triumphed over John Kerry and the forces of Blue-state paternalism. Congratulations. The multinational corporations that hold you in bondage remain free to profit off your sweat nearly tax free, while their overpaid senior execs continue to pay a pittance in personal income tax.

Your primary and secondary schools will continue to turn out third-rate pupils with limited opportunities, while you enjoy the satisfaction of making it on your own without health care when a catastrophic illness bankrupts your family.

Your agricultural universities will continue issuing Ph.D.s in football, and bogus Protestant Evangelical and Fundamentalist theology, and how to jerk off a bull safely. Your children will learn to borrow enough money to erect chicken houses so that they, like you, can take custody -- not possession, but custody -- of Tyson's chicks, feed them, rear them, assume losses from those that fail to thrive, and in the end earn just enough money to service their endless debt, and realize a profit of perhaps $12K a year. Your bank thanks you; Tyson thanks you; George W. Bush thanks you; and I thank you.

You can continue sending your sons to die in Iraq on a fool's errand. When you bury them, you can console yourselves with Bush's platitudes about their heroic mission to defend America from weapons of mass destruction.

You can savor the deficit spending that stimulates commerce today, but will cripple the US economy in ten or fifteen years' time when the bills come due with interest. Perhaps a Democrat will be in office at that time, who can be blamed for W's delayed economic fiasco.

You can continue believing, as Republican Party brainwashing has persuaded you, that we, your neighbors, are your enemies. You can believe that we have no morals; that we pimp out our teenage daughters for Internet porn; that we eat babies; that we are all gay; that we are cowards on the battlefield; and that we want to run your lives and give you AIDS.

Here's a clue: we are not your enemies; we are your countrymen. Your enemies are the greedy multinationals that the Republican Party bends over backwards to accommodate. Incidentally, most of them are based in Blue states, as are their Republican owners and major shareholders.

Here in the Blue States, Democrats and Republicans alike generate the lion's share of America's wealth, although it is you Reds who provide the lion's share of the stoop labor. You are our Mexicans, so to speak. We could not have accomplished the economic miracle that is America without your willing capitulation to a system that lies to you and fucks you over at every turn.

Look at economic output and educational achievement on a state-by-state basis: it's painfully evident that we Blues are immensely more productive and better educated than you Reds. We have lots more money. We live longer. We eat better. We work less. We fuck more. We do cocaine and smoke fine Canadian buds, not the homebrew crank and cheap Mexican headache reefer you guys are stuck with. We drink French wine and Stoli martinis, not Budweiser. Our children rarely bother us: we've got them on Ritalin and Prozac. Our teeth are straighter and whiter, our necks longer, and our fingernails cleaner. And many of us are the Republican elite who have just punked you.

It's good to be a Blue, regardless of which party you join.

Understandably, you resent us, so you've fabricated an imaginary measure of superiority: Christian "values." Yet you talk about values the way a pre-teen girl talks about "love" in fan letters to Ashton Kutcher. You recycle quasi-religious platitudes and received slogans. You know nothing of moral theology, a rigorous philosophical pursuit that hardly exists outside the Catholic Church and its elite universities. You make of the Bible what you will; you attend prayer meetings with other semi-literates, where you reinforce each other's sloppy understandings of the text, and combine them with half-digested bits of old-timey Hallmark-card "wisdom." And when you spout gibberish, you call it "speaking in tongues." You actually fancy that you're saints, you silly, narcissistic creatures.

Nevertheless, you are fellow Americans. The Blue Republican elite encouraged you to vote for George W Bush, because they quite simply own him, and they know that his administration will make policies that help them, even if hurt you. We Blue Democrats voted for John Kerry because we believed he would minister to your needs better than Bush. A President Kerry would have shared some of our wealth with you, assured your health care, raised the minimum wage, and checked the rapacious greed of the multinationals that hold you in thrall.

President Kerry would have helped us to help you, which is all that we ask. It pains us to see you in wage slavery. It pains us to see you so ignorant and uneducated, and so eager to place yourselves in bondage. Yes, we live better; but we wish you to live better too, even if it means sacrifice on our part.

What we wanted for you would have been far better than that which you, in your ignorant pride, demanded for yourselves. Oh, you defeated us all right, but only to your detriment.

Translation: You people are idiots, and we're your betters, and we know what's best for you. It's too bad you're too stupid to understand that we want to help you, and it's too bad that you allowed those evil Republicans and their industrialist supporters to warp and twist your simple little minds by using your pathetic ideas about values against you.

I really hope it was tongue-in-cheek. But why do I suspect there are idiots who believe in this philosophy?

90. At the beginning of the year, who would have thought that it might be Kofi Annan who's no longer in office, instead of Bush or Howard? Yet, the U.N.'s readying for a historic vote to dump Kofi. Maybe he can get a job with Movon.org.

91. I should have thought of this.

92. I'm guessing KISS won't be touring with Springsteen soon...

"In time of war, if you go through a bad neighborhood, I don't want a little French poodle, I want a rottweiler on my hands."

-- KISS frontman GENE SIMMONS, on why he voted for U.S. President GEORGE W. BUSH over JOHN KERRY.

Do the Democrats have any Rottweilers left?