I just finished reading "Crashing the Gate," a brilliant book that lays out what Democrats have to do to recapture the country politically. I agree fully with the strategies and tactics, but I wonder whether elections are relevant any more. Has the battle for democracy already been lost? Is the United States living under a new version of Stalinism that will eventually have to fall under the weight of its own incompetence and corruption?
These are really serious questions. Electronic vote rigging is not even mentioned in "Crashing the Gate" as far as I can tell from my first reading. I am going to back and make sure about that, but it is definitely not a prominent issue.
Despite the attacks on "fraudsters" here on Dailykos, the evidence keeps rolling in that 2004 was rigged. Following after the jump, are excerpts from two reviews of "Fooled Again" that highlight some of the evidence. I find it especially significant that this book was published by a division of Basic Books, the United States' pre-eminent establishment publishing company.
Loot the Vote: The Bush Faction's Future Victories are Already in the Bag
By Chris Floyd
No one has laid bare the malodorous innards of this democracy-devouring monster better than Mark Crispin Miller, whose new book, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Basic Books), takes us back to the dastardy of Election Day 2004 and the hydra-headed campaign of vote-rigging that preceded it. This second heist of the White House is one of the great untold stories of our time - even though it was largely carried out in plain sight.
Miller performs the simple but increasingly rare act of journalism and gathers a mountain of overwhelming evidence from publicly available material. This is no "conspiracy theory" stitched together from anonymous sources, strained inferences and dark innuendo, but a solid case based on official records, sworn testimony, eyewitness accounts, news reports - and the Bushists' own words.
Indeed, the game was actually given away long before the balloting, when one of the Faction's congressional waterboys, Representative Peter King, was captured - on film - boasting that the fix was in. At a White House chow-down in summer 2003, King was asked who he thought would win in 2004. "It's already over," King said. "The election's over. We won...It's all over but the counting. And we'll take care of the counting."
Evidence of a Stolen Election
by Paul Craig Roberts
As coincidence would have it, Mark Crispin Miller's new book, Fooled Again (Basic Books), documenting the Republican theft of the 2004 presidential election, arrived in the same mail delivery with the January 12 edition of the Defuniak Springs Herald, the locally owned weekly newspaper in a Florida panhandle county seat.
The Florida panhandle is thorough-going Republican. Even Democrats run as Republicans. Nevertheless, the newspaper's editor, Ron Kelley, believes that American political life is measured by something larger than party affiliation. In his editorial, "The shepherds and the sheep," Kelley reports that two Florida counties have banned any further use of Diebold voting machines after witnessing a professional demonstration that the machines, contrary to Diebold's claim, are easily hacked to record votes differently from the way in which they are cast by voters.
The pre-election statement by Diebold's CEO that he would work to deliver the election to Bush was apparently no idle boast. In five states where the new "foolproof" electronic voting machines were used, the vote tallies differed substantially from the exit polls. Such a disparity is unusual. The chances of exit polls in five states being wrong are no more than one in one million.