"WHEN FASCISM COMES TO AMERICA IT WILL BE WRAPPED IN THE FLAG
AND CARRYING A CROSS." -SINCLAIR LEWIS

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Election Legitimacy: 2000 vs 2008

Olive Willis makes some comparisons in light of the fact that 76% of Democrats thought Bush was an illegitimate president in 2001 versus recent polling showing that 52% of Republicans think that ACORN stole the election for Obama:

Let’s look at the ways this is dumb.

* Obama beat McCain by 7%. He beat him by 10 million votes overall. Bush lost to Gore in the popular vote by 0.51%. Gore got over 500,000 more votes than Bush.

* The 2000 election went into a recount

* The recount was halted by Bush bringing a case to the Supreme court, adjudicated by some judges appointed by his father, using legal precedents that only somehow applied to this one case

So, in one case, we had a clear and present winner beyond dispute yet conservatives insist that a community activist group somehow stole the election for the victor.

In the other case we have a close, complicated election that involved the intervention of the Supreme court in which the winner of the lesser amount of votes was eventually sworn in as president.

Yeah, the two cases are just the same. Where’s Obama’s birth certificate?
Never mind that there are no credible theories or verifiable proof to back up these claims against ACORN, or even that most people who believe them don't even know the difference between voter registration fraud and actual voter fraud. All that matters to these people is that they dislike Obama and that they make every effort to vilify him. Things like reality and facts just get in the way of that.

4 comments:

Leslie Parsley said...

Good post. I don't think the GOP politicians or their supporters have ever been concerned with facts, truth or reality. Hopefully, the scallywags will be voted out of office.

JBW said...

I have to disagree, Leslie. The GOP was actually a somewhat intellectually honest party at one point but their current incarnation has fallen far short of that. And unfortunately I fear that they'll gain some ground in 2010.

Anonymous said...

'The GOP was actually a somewhat intellectually honest party at one point but their current incarnation has fallen far short of that.'

I have been something of a pain on this blog in the past, but I actually do agree with James here. Ronald Reagan's most vocal and intellectually honest critic in his three presidential campaigns was Republican congressman John Anderson of California and Anderson even broke party ranks to run against Reagan as an independent in 1984.

I've spoken before about the liberal Republicans to whom liberal reformers of the 1950s and 1960s were indebted... if they had need to rely on Democratic votes then Southern Democrats (many of whom became Republicans, such as Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms)with violently conservative leanings would have successfully blocked everything. Ditto civil rights.

We owe Republicans as much on this issue as we do Democrats, and many of the Democrats who sponsored the reforms of the Johnson era had liberal Republican co-sponsors.

While conservatism is not new, much of the political strategy has its origins in the Nixon Era and most of the actual business of fulfilling the promises behind the right wing rhetoric takes it origins from the Reagan Era.

This is not to say that I think Robert A. Taft or Barry Goldwater were /right/, but they were intellectually honest and men of integrity.

Leslie Parsley said...

You're absolutley right, JBW. I've been trying to distinguish between the conservative and the right-wingers for some time. Poor choice of words on my part. I hope you're wrong about gaining ground in 2010.