Tomorrow, November 7th, is election day in the USA. for the past two weeks I've been getting pounded with canned calls and surveys from “news” organizations all wanting to know or change my vote.
I hang up on the canned calls and I lie to the pollsters. Now I'm going to tell you why.
Does anyone remember a certain election in 2000 where the “news organizations” called a state before ALL of the polls in that state closed? Let me remind you, it was Florida.
Do you also remember all the confusion that occurred because people in the pan handle of the state were told not to bother voting as the election had already been called?
Now, if the state had not been called prematurely we may have had a different president in 2000. One thing I'm sure of is that we would have had a larger margin of victory in the election and much less of the fiasco we did have.
But, that's just sour grapes...
Do you also remember 2004? The election where the “exit polling” showed a Kerry win yet Bush still won!
That is where I come in, as well as thousands of people like me.
We are sick of the “news organizations” taking polls and then massaging the information to fit the story they want to run.
We are also tired of “news organizations” trying to get the scoop and call an election first.
Why did the “news organizations” act so giddy during the day of the 2004 election? Because people like me were feeding the exit pollsters erroneous information. We knew who the established media wanted to see in office so we just told them what they wanted to hear. what did they do when their “man” didn't win? Why they question the vote rather than the exit polling data.
There's an old saying in physics circles”
Gravity: It's the law
The same goes in voting, it's easy to tamper with exit polling but it's harder (not impossible) to tamper with the actual vote.
In a race with a wide margin of victory you can't tamper enough to make a difference without getting caught. In a race where the margin is very slim then it is relatively easy to find a “missing box of ballots” for your candidate.
I live in Connecticut where the race is between Lieberman and Lamont. Yeah, there is some Republican guy in there but we know he's just there for show.
Lamont beat Lieberman in the primary but... As a whole, Connecticut has far more registered Independents than anything else. Independents don't get to vote in primaries but they DO get to vote in the general election. A win by Lamont in the primary did not mean much. Joe knows who supports him and it's a group bigger than the Connecticut Democrats!
So, over the past weeks and months since the primary I've been getting polling calls about who I might vote for in the Senate race. I tell them Lamont.
I'm not going to vote for the guy! I just want the polling data screwed up enough so that come election day the media can sit there scratching their collective heads wondering why Lamont lost 70-30!
On a related note... I find it very interesting that the Limbaugh/Fox story has persisted for two weeks now yet the Kerry "only dumb people join the service" flap was rather quickly swept under the rug. What is most interesting is that Fox himself admitted he "over-medicated" before the commercial to exaggerate his movements.
As for the Kerry "apology"
I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform, and I personally apologize to any service member, family member, or American who was offended.
He is clearly insulting the troops once more by insinuating that if they were simply smarter, like him, they would have gotten the joke and not been insulted.
Read the above statement and you can see that it is not an apology, it is an accusation that HE is the victim of an ignorant group of people who simply do not understand him.
A real man would have looked at his words (as spoken) and admitted that the content of his words are derogatory towards the men and woman who serve in the US Armed Forces.
You don't shoot someone and then defiantly tell them, “Well, I didn't mean to hit you. I was aiming for that guy over there... But it's still not my fault! It's your fault for being in the path of my bullet!”
Then again, Kerry did get three Purple Hearts and who am I to speak badly about him?
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While I agree with your views of the media trying to “get the scoop” interferring with the election process in this country, that is not the whole issue. Don’t forget in the 2000 presidential election there were people being told they could not vote–that’s not only unethical it’s illegal. And the popular vote was revealed after all was said and done to have been in Kerry’s favor yet the electoral college voted in Bush’s. So the problem isn’t caused by one factor or issue, but by many, as is unfortunately the case with most issues this country has been facing for the last 50 years.
As to your interpretation of Kerry’s apology, isn’t disecting what he said as you have done exactly what started that whole scharade of a news story? He critized the President of the United States–as is his right–botching it midsentence to make it end up sound like he was criticizing the troops. He apologized, however much you may not like the way he did it, and explained what he truly meant by the statement. Haven’t you ever put your foot in your mouth or stumbled over a speech? I know I have.
On the issue of criticizing the military, let’s assume for arguments sake that truly was what he was doing. Big deal. American citizens have not only the right, but the civic responsibility and ethical and moral obligation to question and criticize their leaders and those representing them to foreign peoples when said leadership and/or representation is not in line with popular desire or opinion. I’m not saying I have a problem with the men and women in uniform for my family has been a proud military family for seven generations, but I am saying that even a buck private in Iraq needs to step forward and question why we are still involved in a war that was begun under false pretenses, losing American lives for a people that don’t want us there. This is the Vietnam of the 21st century, and not just due to popular opinion versus the ruling party’s; containment and regime-building policies do not work, however benevolent a mask those enforcing them might wear as history has proved. We didn’t win Korea, we didn’t win Vietnam, we didn’t win in South and Central America and we aren’t winning in Iraq. So the next time you want to gripe about something a politician said remember two things: first, they’re the ones brave enough to put themselves and their families in the media limelight while you sit anonymously at your PC ridiculing them and second, discovering that a member of the opposing political party has some trash to expose doesn’t excuse the trash found back home. Gingrich was calling Clinton out for cheating on his wife while doing the same thing himself–both were wrong…period. Same goes for Bush and the hippocritical, homosexual, alcoholic pedophiles in or pushing for the Republican party–Kerry being disrespectful in his criticism was rude, but it wasn’t immoral or hippocritical. It was honest, which is more than can be said for the party that lost today.
Sean, thanks for the comment.
1) One thing we have learned about the “Wisdom of Crowds” is that it only works if the whole crowd is unaware of what the other members in the crowd are thinking. Because the USA covers many time zones it is possible to influence the results of an election by releasing results before all of the polls close. This can be seen in the “follow the leader” mentality on the website Digg.com.
Voter intimidation is a bad thing and I’m all for putting a stop to it.
As for total vote counts, the president is not elected by the popular vote so that makes the popular vote irelavent.
2) My purpose in disecting the words of Kerry’s apology is that he is not taking the blame for “mis-speaking” but is instead blaming it on the listener.
It’s also strange that he would be talking about Bush when Bush had better grades at Yale than Kerry!
3) As for your third paragraph, we will have to agree to disagree. History will tell whether or not Iraq was worth the cost.
As for Clinton/Gingrich… Gingrich lost his job over it, Clinton did not.