Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Jim Lampley: Repugs Stole the 2004 Election
Jim Lampley, HBO boxing commentator and recent guest blogger on Ariana Huffington's new celebrity blog, says the Republicans stole the 2004 election. How does he know? He says you need to follow the numbers, especially the betting odds:
At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. You can look it up.
People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election.
And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil.
Many of the participants in this blog have graduate school educations. It is damned near impossible to go to graduate school in any but the most artistic disciplines without having to learn about the basics of social research and its uncanny accuracy and validity. We know that professionally conceived samples simply do not yield results which vary six, eight, ten points from eventual data returns, thaty's why there are identifiable margins for error. We know that margins for error are valid, and that results have fallen within the error range for every Presidential election for the past fifty years prior to last fall. NEVER have exit polls varied by beyond-error margins in a single state, not since 1948 when this kind of polling began. In this past election it happened in ten states, all of them swing states, all of them in Bush's favor. Coincidence? Of course not.
Karl Rove isn't capable of conceiving and executing such a grandiose crime? Wake up. They did it. The silence of traditional media on this subject is enough to establish their newfound bankruptcy. The revolution will have to start here. I challenge every other thinker at the Huffington Post: is there any greater imperative than to reverse this crime and reestablish democracy in America? Why the mass silence? Let's go to work with the circumstantial evidence, begin to narrow from the outside in, and find some witnesses who will turn. That's how they cracked Watergate. This is bigger, and I never dreamed I would say that in my baby boomer lifetime.
Wow. Every smug reporter on MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC should be forced to read Lampley's post and watch All The President's Men over and over again until they get some freaking guts to call the Repugs on their subversion of the American democracy. But instead we get the Howard Finemans and the Judy Woodruffs of the world who smirk every time the "stolen election" story is mentioned and say, "That can't happen in America. We're not a banana republic."
Right. And the World Series couldn't be fixed either. But Arnold Rothstein did fix it in 1919 and made a bundle of money off of the deal too. Never got caught for it either, though the Black Sox players were banned from baseball for life and lots of people lost their shirts on the fraudulent outcome.
So you know Rove had the 2004 election fixed too. The exit polls don't lie. I knew the fix was in about 9:30 p.m., when the president called the press into the White House for an off-the-cuff conference to confidently tell Americans he was going to win the election. Son of a bitch, I thought, Rove's pulled a Rothstein! And he had. Ohio was his. Florida was his. The fix was in. They knew! There was no paper trail from the electronic voting, the plan was foolproof! Nobody would believe the election could be fixed in 2004!
And Rove was right. Nobody believed. If you even mentioned the "stolen election" story in mixed company, most people started measuring you for a tinfoil cap. But the people who knew, we weren't crazy, just cynical enough to believe Rove could get away with it.
And as Lampley writes in his post, sports bettors knew that night that Rove had fixed the election too, just the way Bush and Rove knew, just the way some folks in Ohio and Florida know. And Lampley's right, they can be turned, if only somebody from the press would get on the case. Remember, nobody thought Nixon could be brought down either. And while Rothstein got away with the 1919 Black Sox scandal, he did get his in the end. He was murdered in 1928 for welshing on a $320,000 poker debt.
Which means there's hope for getting Rove and Bush. If Rothstein and Nixon could go down, so can Rove and Bush. And wouldn't you love to see both of those bastards being perp-walked out of the White House for the "perp-walk loving" cable media?
At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. You can look it up.
People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election.
And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil.
Many of the participants in this blog have graduate school educations. It is damned near impossible to go to graduate school in any but the most artistic disciplines without having to learn about the basics of social research and its uncanny accuracy and validity. We know that professionally conceived samples simply do not yield results which vary six, eight, ten points from eventual data returns, thaty's why there are identifiable margins for error. We know that margins for error are valid, and that results have fallen within the error range for every Presidential election for the past fifty years prior to last fall. NEVER have exit polls varied by beyond-error margins in a single state, not since 1948 when this kind of polling began. In this past election it happened in ten states, all of them swing states, all of them in Bush's favor. Coincidence? Of course not.
Karl Rove isn't capable of conceiving and executing such a grandiose crime? Wake up. They did it. The silence of traditional media on this subject is enough to establish their newfound bankruptcy. The revolution will have to start here. I challenge every other thinker at the Huffington Post: is there any greater imperative than to reverse this crime and reestablish democracy in America? Why the mass silence? Let's go to work with the circumstantial evidence, begin to narrow from the outside in, and find some witnesses who will turn. That's how they cracked Watergate. This is bigger, and I never dreamed I would say that in my baby boomer lifetime.
Wow. Every smug reporter on MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC should be forced to read Lampley's post and watch All The President's Men over and over again until they get some freaking guts to call the Repugs on their subversion of the American democracy. But instead we get the Howard Finemans and the Judy Woodruffs of the world who smirk every time the "stolen election" story is mentioned and say, "That can't happen in America. We're not a banana republic."
Right. And the World Series couldn't be fixed either. But Arnold Rothstein did fix it in 1919 and made a bundle of money off of the deal too. Never got caught for it either, though the Black Sox players were banned from baseball for life and lots of people lost their shirts on the fraudulent outcome.
So you know Rove had the 2004 election fixed too. The exit polls don't lie. I knew the fix was in about 9:30 p.m., when the president called the press into the White House for an off-the-cuff conference to confidently tell Americans he was going to win the election. Son of a bitch, I thought, Rove's pulled a Rothstein! And he had. Ohio was his. Florida was his. The fix was in. They knew! There was no paper trail from the electronic voting, the plan was foolproof! Nobody would believe the election could be fixed in 2004!
And Rove was right. Nobody believed. If you even mentioned the "stolen election" story in mixed company, most people started measuring you for a tinfoil cap. But the people who knew, we weren't crazy, just cynical enough to believe Rove could get away with it.
And as Lampley writes in his post, sports bettors knew that night that Rove had fixed the election too, just the way Bush and Rove knew, just the way some folks in Ohio and Florida know. And Lampley's right, they can be turned, if only somebody from the press would get on the case. Remember, nobody thought Nixon could be brought down either. And while Rothstein got away with the 1919 Black Sox scandal, he did get his in the end. He was murdered in 1928 for welshing on a $320,000 poker debt.
Which means there's hope for getting Rove and Bush. If Rothstein and Nixon could go down, so can Rove and Bush. And wouldn't you love to see both of those bastards being perp-walked out of the White House for the "perp-walk loving" cable media?
