A Level Gaze

A Level Gaze

"What effect must it have on a nation if it learns no foreign languages? Probably much the same as that which a total withdrawal from society has upon an individual."
--G.C. Lichtenberg

Friday, November 05, 2004

Nothing to See Here, Move Along

Over at Ethel the Blog, I found linked this county-by-county list of Florida votes, which includes party registration percentages and calculates the percent of the expected vote for each party by multiplying the total number of votes cast by the percentage of party affiliation. Some of the results are very surprising:

County V_Rep V_Dem V_Ttl %Reg_R %Reg_D Tot_Registered
Calhoun 3,780 2,116 5,961 11.9% 82.4% 8,350
Hardee 5,047 2,147 7,245 26.7% 63.8% 10,399
Liberty 1,927 1,070 3,021 7.9% 88.3% 4,075
Madison 4,195 4,048 8,306 14.9% 79.5% 11,371

According to this, we're supposed to believe that Calhoun County, that has an 82-12% Democratic voter registration advantage, somehow went for Bush by 64-35%. Perhaps Hardee County, with a 64-27% Democratic majority, preferred Dubya by 70-30%. Or Liberty County, where Democratic voter affiliation is 11 times more common than its Republican counterpart (88-8%), chose Bush by 64-36%.

My favorite is Madison County, where voters built a bridge to the Republican party by selecting Bush 51-49%, despite an 80-15% Democratic majority and a population that is 40.3% Black.

For about 2 minutes, I imagined posting this and becoming an instant blog superstar. I'd show everyone the obviously bogus numbers from Florida, the results would be nullified, and Kerry would be president. And he'd owe it all to me, ME! Mwahahaha, etc.

Just to make sure, and to further highlight the divergence from expected voting behavior, I looked up the 2000 Florida county election results. Each of the four counties I highlighted for looking suspicious had voted for Bush-Cheney in 2000 by significant margins. There goes the Pulitzer.

Maybe there's something different about small-county Floridians that causes them to vote for Republican presidential candidates. Or maybe there's something very wrong with these registration and/or voting numbers. Unfortunately, it's probably the latter.

Edit: I can't figure out how to make the spaces entered in the post editing window show up in the final post for the election figures. If anyone knows how to do that in Blogger, I'd be much obliged if someone would drop me a note via e-mail or in comments. Thanks.

posted by David at 11/05/2004 12:20:00 AM ::

Thursday, November 04, 2004

Now They Fucking Tell Us

The soldiers, who belong to two different units, described how Iraqis plundered explosives from unsecured bunkers before driving off in Toyota trucks.

The U.S. troops said there was little they could do to prevent looting of the ammunition site, 30 miles south of Baghdad.

"We were running from one side of the compound to the other side, trying to kick people out," said one senior noncommissioned officer who was at the site in late April 2003.

"On our last day there, there were at least 100 vehicles waiting at the site for us to leave" so looters could come in and take munitions.

"It was complete chaos. It was looting like L.A. during the Rodney King riots," another officer said.

He and other soldiers who spoke to The Times asked not to be named, saying they feared retaliation from the Pentagon.

These guys were there, they witnessed and lived with this clusterfuck. Day in and day out, they faced the very real prospect of being blown to hell by the bombs, missiles, and explosives they had watched being driven off into the countryside. They cleared their throats and went back to work, and didn't care enough to speak up about it until until 18 months later. No wonder other countries don't want to mess with us. We're crazy.

There was a presidential election a little while back where one of the candidates, the guy who started the war and endorsed its strategy, was claiming the other candidate would make America less safe. It was his biggest issue. His incompetent underlings created a situation where we couldn't, or wouldn't, secure a known arms depot containing thousands upon thousands of tons of weapons. In. a. fucking. war. zone. Wait, make that two humongous arms depots. I don't know what to call a military command that fails even to plan to secure known munition dumps during battle except dangerously incompetent and unfit to lead.

That LA riots image would have torn right through the heart of Bush's strong leader persona and given Kerry the presidency. It came two days too late. I can't stand it.

posted by David at 11/04/2004 08:00:00 PM ::

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Fighting Fire With Water

Eric Alterman says:

The problem is just this: Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the “reality-based community” say or believe about anything.

They don’t care that Iraq is turning into murderous quicksand and a killing field for our children. They don’t care that the Bush presidency has made us less safe by creating more terrorists, inspiring more anti-American hatred and refusing to engage in the hard work that would be necessary to make a meaningful dent in our myriad vulnerabilities at home. They don’t care that he has mortgaged our children’s future to give trillions to the wealthiest among us. They don’t care that the economy continues to hemorrhage well-paying jobs and replace them with Wal-Mart; that the number without health insurance is over forty million and rising. They don’t care that Medicare premiums are rising to fund the coffers of pharmaceutical companies. They don’t care that the air they breathe and the water they drink is being slowly poisoned and though they call themselves conservatives, they even don’t care that the size of the government and its share of our national income has increased by roughly a quarter in just four years. This is not a world of rational debate and issue preference.

It’s one of “them” and “us.” He’s one of “them” and not one of “us” and that’s all they care about. True it’s an illusion. After all, Bush is a millionaire’s son who went to Yale and Harvard and sat out Vietnam, not even bothering to show up for his cushy National Guard duty, and succeeded only in trading on his father’s name and connections in adult life. But somehow, they feel he understands them. He speaks their language. Our guys don’t. And unless they learn it, we will continue to condemn this country and those parts of the world it affects to a regime of malign neglect at best—malignant and malicious assault at worse.

There's something cultlike about the devotion of a lot of Bush's admirers, and he encourages it. He does not claim to have any specific skills or expertise; he's a man of negligible achievement who was somehow called to lead. He claims to receive instructions from God's own mouth. He has said that, as president, he feels no obligation to answer for himself to anyone. It often seems that he believes himself to possess some form of divine right.

And people go along with it.

If he does something wrong, it's not really wrong. If it is, it's not his fault. If he doesn't understand something, it's not important. His manifest failures of thought and speech are never taken for signs of incompetence. His incompetence is never pertinent. He makes no mistakes and regrets nothing.

The left is never going to move these people as easily and effectively as George W. Bush does unless we start our own cult and defeat his cult in cult-to-cult combat. Sounds painful and degrading. As an alternative, I suggest we look into mass deprogramming.

posted by David at 11/03/2004 11:22:00 PM ::

Save Us From Ourselves!

When the confetti and rent clothing have settled and been swept away, the inaction of moderate Republicans will be revealed to be one of the pivotal keys to the 2004 election results. To those of us with keen eyes, their dismay at Bush administration and House leadership has long been evident and widespread. On the wider stage, however, it was never enunciated worth a damn.

Dozens of high-ranking military officers are quietly on record as oppposing the Iraq war, the strategy and tactics employed, and/or the number and provisioning of troops assigned to the task. But the American public voted without knowing this.

Nearly every economist worth a damn believes that Bush's fiscal policies are a train wreck waiting to happen. Some of them have gently hinted as much in papers and petitions that nobody, least of all themselves, ever bothered to publicize. Aside from (that shrill communist) Paul Krugman, Donald Luskin got more press than the rest of them put together. The American public voted without hearing about this.

Hardly anyone with an actual basis for credibility thinks Bush's plan to privatize Social Security is beneficial, much less workable. The word never got out. While the fair and balanced media yammered and dithered without ever stating that 1+1-1 can in no possible universe equal 2, sane Republicans stared at their shoes. The American public voted believing there wasn't much difference between the two candidates.

The way election dynamics work is that, when there's a really awful president, people defect from his party in a visible way. John Kerry saying Bush is a disaster is so much electioneering bushwah without at least some visible support from the other party. And we got none.

The moderates figured that if it was obvious to them, it had to be positively white-hot to the Democrats and independents, whose high turnout would carry the day and keep them from having to make the difficult decision to tell the truth. But they figured wrong, and Kerry's appeals to facts were swamped by Bush's appeals to base instinct and prejudice, both of which require no external reinforcement.

The image that sticks with me is that of John McCain during an interview with Dan Rather at about 7:30 election night. He's clearly gritting his teeth as he repeats the toneless mantra: "I support President Bush," even as he acknowledges, but can't bring himself to voice opposition to, Bush's failed and stupid policies.

These people, who sleep in the same bed with the gang that made an art form of repudiating rationality as a political device, bet on the rationality of the American electorate and lost badly. For their trouble, the best they can look forward to is to sullenly go along with the New Nutjob Diktat with their skins intact. I doubt they'll get it.

posted by David at 11/03/2004 02:07:00 PM ::

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

It Can't Happen Here

While we listened this morning to NPR's recapping of the Ohio and South Dakota voter intimidation rulings, my girlfriend expressed a very keen insight: "what would we think if this was happening in another country? The ruling party has people going to polling places to challenge and intimidate voters. It would be so obvious the election was bogus." A half-second's reflection told me she was absolutely right.

For all of the handwringing over the legitimacy of this year's Venezuelan referendum, we never saw partisans of Hugo Chavez openly challenging the elegibility of likely opposition voters. If we had, U.S. neocons would have been screaming for military intervention to remove him from office.

If there had been evidence that former Turkish prime minister Tansu Ciller's brother had deliberately attempted to purge Islamists from voter registration rolls, there would have been riots in the streets, and foreign policy wonks worldwide would have been tsk-tsking over Turkey's crooked democracy and the EU would have washed its hands of them.

It's an open secret here that high voter turnout favors Democrats generally, and especially in the presidential race. In one sense, it could be said that any Republican presidential victory, given the manifest and continuing preference for their opponents, is somehow illegitimate. However, because voting is not mandatory, the winner is the one who gets more actual votes, case closed.

I can accept this without question. Although I loathed them both, I had no problem with Reagan and Bush I taking office; they both won beyond a reasonable suspicion of shenanigans, and I had to shut up and deal. Fair enough.

What must foreigners think of our democracy in light of Jeb Bush's attempted purge of eligible black voters? What must they think in light of the Republican recruitment and deployment of poll challengers in Ohio and elsewhere? What must they think of Republican operatives conspicuously writing down license plate numbers of Native Americans in South Dakota?

They must think that America's democracy is rigged, that it's a sham. They must think that the side controlling the government is cheating and that the will of the public is being subordinated to that of the rich and the powerful. They must think that the United States of America no longer lives by the principle that everyone is equal and has the right to be counted. They must think that representative government here is dead or dying.

Why don't we think that here? Isn't it obvious?

The fact that we may get enough votes this time to overcome this creeping anti-democratic cancer absolves us of nothing. If we do not make ourselves heard on this issue, we'll deserve what we get.

posted by David at 11/02/2004 12:20:00 AM ::

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