[edited and updated - now with enhanced (that is to say, clarified) skepticism!]
Been on hiatus from Dkos for awhile. (Props to my psychic friends that I popped back in just in time for the long-awaited Beta of DK4!)
Been angry lately too, & falling back toward the kind of despair that started to lift for me with Dean and the blogosphere around 2003. Looking at Markos' recent post, and the comments there, tells me I'm not entirely alone in this.
Filibuster reform (to pull something else off today's front page) would be fantastic, and maybe a sea-change. But taking back the presidency from Bush (and Cheney), and putting in an African-American intellectual -- one who, while clearly rather moderate, cut his teeth as a grassroots activist on the streets of Chicago -- might have been expected to create a bit more change as well. Follow me over the fold for some big questions. Not claims, mind you, questions -- none of which have anything to do with exactly how certain building were destroyed (a question to which I pretty much believe the 'mainstream' answer).
I admit it, I listened to Mark Crispin Miller recently, and it freaked me out a bit.
I apparently wasn't emphatic nor quite focused enough in my first post: I am raising a specific question here about one of Miller's claims. While he claims (as did some on this site in 04, though I believe a few of them were eventually banned for it, on the 'extraordinary claims/extraordinary evidence' standard) that there is clear evidence of massive electoral fraud in the 2004 election, and even in 2008 (though he suggests that the poor saps underestimated Obama's landslide and blew that last one), he makes one remark that should be in a sense 'testable', which I'll get to in a moment.
Generally, I'm not very inclined to believe this kind of thing. But lately there are things that keep popping into my head:
- the disturbing stories that I kept hearing about Ohio in 2004
- the chill I felt when I read Miller noting that to commit major electoral fraud you need a story, a narrative, which will explain the results afterwards
- the chills kicked in when he mentioned that in 2004 the 'story' was the unexpected groundswell of Rove's quietly organized values voters. This was a story I had readily believed. But where'd they go, he asks: who has really looked into that? There it is, testable, see below. (In 2008, he suggests, the Bradley Effect was prepped and ready)
- Bush and Cheney, so confident they will never face accountability
- the stunning speed with which certain elements in the media seized on the ludicrous noise-canceling microphone Dean scream moment. Was that just the MSM being itself or was there a push, a fear that for all his centrism Dean was not enough of a team player to allow in the big house?
- the year I was born, 1963.
- the year I turned 5, 1968.
- my relationship to the radical left: pretty alienated at the moment. (I mean, why doesn't somebody -- somebody ELSE, just to be clear -- do more of the hard work of sorting truth from conspiracy, of articulating a passionate yet persuasive-to-the-unconverted manifesto of change that can shake people out of complacency and despair, etc.)
- my relationship to the Democrats: less alienated, but as I said, beginning to despair.
So I keep wondering where the lines really are - where the limits are - what Obama believes are his limits of action and why.
I was born in 1963, and if I let myself think about it at 3am, I don't have any freakin clue what really happened that year. Nor what really happened when I was five years old.
Now (through the miracle of mathematics)I'm 47. And if I'm being too damned obscure, I was alluding just above to the Kennedys. As I said, I don't gravitate to conspiracy theories, generally, but.... I've been thinking a lot about how 'closed' American politics seems to be, and I just find myself wondering.
So WTF are we supposed to do?
I know, I know, get active, talk to people, innovate, do the best we can, respect our collective best understanding of what's true and do what we can to improve it, keep an open mind, check on wild stories before believing them.
And filibuster reform (if...if...)and the long, backbreaking slog?
I want a little hope. Or a bit more understanding. Both would be cool.
It's actually one in the afternoon, but for you, dear reader, I am channeling a bit of that 3am fear & frustration at how F'd up things are, at how bloody our history is, and at how much we may never really know.
So, two completely serious questions to end on:
- Who has done the best work to openmindedly but fact-respectingly review the 2004 election, and all those unexpected voters Rove organized through evangelical churches?
- Is Mark Crispin Miller just being an irresponsible jerk to suggest that the values voters upset smells like a lie?
Update: on the latter, see Stuart Heady's thoughtful and personal comment below, as someone who grew up around folks who would become footsolders and maybe more in the Right, on how eminently plausible the Rove voter surge looks to him.