Is he right? What do we do about it?
”The GOP Is Certain to Win in 2006 — Unless…”
I have frequently been accused of being hopelessly optimistic. Perhaps so: that’s what keeps me going. But now, for those who thrive on gloom and doom – it’s your turn. Here’s the very bad news: the Democrats will almost certainly lose in 2006 and again in 2008.Three essential reasons: (a) the GOP and the Bush junta simply cannot afford to lose, (b) they can prevent their defeat no matter what the voters have to say about it (as they have in the last three elections), and (c) apparently the Democratic Party, the media, and law enforcement are unable and/or unwilling to do anything about it.
– From Ernest Partridge at The Crisis Papers, via Howard Martin’s blog
The decision by the Democratic national Committee to stay mum through the crises of the past five years has led to this inevitable collapse because we now have our base totally disenchanted, th fear of an external threat sown and burnt into our consciousness and the idea that the Republicans can be mean and tough enough on the naysayers at home and the enemies abroad has been allowed to take hold.
What galls me the most is that no Democratic leader worth his salt has seen fit to challenge the electoral irregularities.That timidity speaks volumes for people.
I think that we really have to zero in on forcing honest elections and raising holy hell after the stolen ones. I don’t agree that Republicans will win honestly, more people I talk to are totally fed up with them than not. I think the Dems. really need to stop the Republican lite nonsense though, if there is no clear choice, no real difference between them, then the Republicans will win.
The further to the right the Dems. drift the harder it is to energize voters.
And the economy is key, tackle economic issues and stress them-making the rich richer is not going over well down in my strata of society. If we thought anyone at the top had any concern for us we’d be there for them. The problem is that shoving the mountain from the bottom is an endless challenge and it’s hard to keep heart.
Thank you for bringing this right to the front page. Why is everyone spending so much time wasting energy on who, who, who when it doesn’t matter if we don’t fix the basic problems?
And again I say what makes you think by 08 we will be allowed to vote at all? Is it not time to stop arguing about the little stuff and stand up together and fix the big problem so then we can get back to arguing the small stuff. Green, Lib, Dem, Rep. every race, creed, and color, if you love your country unit we have a common problem with vote fraud it affects everyone. After we get fair elections get out there and kick each others ass.
Thanks for the link to “The Crisis Papers;” I’d wandered over there following links once before, but it was back around the election.
I think that there’s less tinfoil in his posting than I’d like. On the other hand, he makes it clear that Republican wins in 2006 and 2008 are a sure bet only if “nothing happens.” Well, if there’s one safe bet, it’s that something is going to happen. Yes, electoral reform is definitely needed, and would be the ideal way to “make something happen,” but if electoral margins are big enough (say over 10% difference) due to other factors, then I don’t believe we’d see the current junta staying in power by election fraud. We’d see them staying in power by permitting another 9-11 style attack and a resulting period of martial law, perhaps.
But there are several “somethings” that could still happen…
Plamegate is the one farthest along. Another Iraq version of the Tet Offensive might happen (although the case could be made we’re in the middle of one now, but the press refuses to give it adequate coverage). The press might get some spine, causing wider unrest. They might restore a draft, and it would be 1970 all over again. The soccer moms on the way to the mega-church would not be happy with that. Oil prices could spike at any time. The housing bubble could burst. A bird flu or SARS pandemic. A currency crisis.
And then there’s the totally unpredictable, something like the Chernobyl accident and how it contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union.
I see lots of ways for change to come about, and only a few ways for the status quo to continue into 2006 and 2008. It’s an unstable situation, and the longer it goes on, the more likely something is to spin out of control.
In fact, they’ve been slowly losing control of one thing after another almost since the election. I’d say that’s the most probably course of events, going right into the 2006 elections. Once they start to lose control, people will feel freer to start to leak things, to go slow on orders, to challenge the administration in press conferences, to pick up a protest sign, etc. Lord knows they’re already got the CIA pissed off big time – that’s none too smart.
So I’m more optimistic than pessimistic, at least at the moment. I’ve tentatively put the plans to move to Canada on hold pending the 2006 elections.
I wish I was as optimistic.
Things started going out of control for the Bushies almost as soon as they took office. 9/11 was itself a major “out of control” and they adapted and used it for their own purposes. What should have happened was for them to be recognized as responsible for their own inaction on terrorists and misplaced priorities on anti-missile defense. They used their own failure with terrorists to justify the unconnected war in Iraq.
Then the war in Iraq went bad, beginning at least as early as the looting. (Turkey’s refusal to let the 3rd Inf div land and attack from the north was also a Bush failure.) But the inadequate number of troops, the disbanding of the Iraqi military and police, the failure to get Chalabi installed as Iraqi leader, the growth – almost with the permission of the Coalition Provisional Authority – and being forced by the Iraqis to accept early elections — this is all failed Bush policies.
The whole Plame affair is the result of a now-failed effort to smear a critic of the lies they were telling to start the war they have totally failed to accomplish.
Yet they used the failure of 9/11 and the purposeless war in Iraq to regain total control of the Congress in 2002 and they used fear of terrorism to get Bush reelected in 2004.
They have been great fear-mongers. Fear has kept the Republicans in office, and even the venal corruption of the CPA and the Republican Congressmen doesn’t seem to faze the American voters much.
The Democrats still don’t have a counter-message, and if they did, they have no organized system of getting it out. We don’t have a system of message development and testing that our leaders can use before they employ the messages. That is part of what killed Dean. The Republicans have an established system of developing, focus-grouping, and test marketing messages before live politicians have to risk their career presenting them. In political terms, it is rather like the Polish horse cavalry attacking the German tanks in 1939.
Unpredictable things? The Bush administration has been brilliant at turning unpredictable things to their advantage or at least neutralizing them.
Like you, I rather hope that the weight of failure and incompetence catchs up with them in the next 15 to 39 months, but the old saying is true. “Hope is not a Plan.”
I have to give you a 4 because I cannot disagree with your observations. Guess it depends on how hopeful one is. Hopefully it’s hopeful and not naive, LOL.
You also get a 4 because I had a great grandfather who was a Polish cavalry officer before coming to America – fortunately, before the cavalry faced the German tanks.
My “hope” is that Democrats will recognize the odds against them and take actions to change the structure of the next elections. Dean seems to be moving that direction, but I don’t know how many others are.
I am ex-military, and the battle the Polish army put up against the somewhat mechanized German army is one of the more glorious stories out of war. The Chezks didn’t try. I also still remember those two ranger sergeants in Mogidishu who, seeing the firefight on the ground around the downed Blackhawk, told the pilot to insert them into the fight. They knew the odds were hundreds to one and they wouldn’t be back. They went anyway.
Then there is the Army Captain at Fort Benning, GA who was there when a sniper started shooting at soldiers who were out jogging. I don’t remember his name, but he ran TOWARDS the sniper, not away. And yeah, he was killed also. But they got the sniper.
The police and firemen in the WTC on 9/11 performed that way, also.
Suicidal. Maybe stupid. Truly grand. I don’t ever want to be put into that situation, and if I am, I hope I can do what they did.
But better is to not get put into that kind of no-win situation, and right now I see any Democratic candidate for President in 2008 to be politically suicidal in the same way Dole was in 1996.
We HAVE TO change the structure of American politics before the election. Suicidal situations mean that the people responsible failed or were caught by surprise. We have no excuse for being caught by surprise in 2006 and 2008.
One thing does take my breath away though. Once upon a time when the scandal was smaller I used to think calmly to myself that all we really need is to take one of the Houses in 2006 and this whole act is going to jail! The enormity of the scandal though now causes me a little panic because these assholes from hell are so up a creek if they lose either House in 2006, and I find myself wondering what a person might do to avoid that kind of ass beating and jailing (and that’s if we go lightly on them). I fear THEIR desperation…..no maybe a better way of putting it is that I am PREPARING for their desperation knowing that something that I find very horrible could happen when they act it out and more innocent people could really get hurt or be killed!
It’s funny. I was just surfing the net today regarding voting irregularities, you know the story we’re not supposed to talk about at Dkos? Here’s a sample of what I found:
if we can find candidates who are prepared to speak in simple, declarative sentences.
If the Al Gore I’ve seen recently had shown up for the 2000 campaign, George Bush wouldn’t have had a prayer.
I still don’t know if John Kerry supported the invasion of Iraq.
I don’t know where Mrs. Clinton stands on anything – and when she speaks she does an excellent job of keeping it that way.
Why is it unimaginable that a Democratic candidate could stand up and say “There is no excuse for the United States of America in the 21st century not having affordable health care for all of our citizens”?
We can win if we stop worrying about losing.
Are you saying there was no vote fraud? Or even with vote fraud if we just had better candidates we would win?
It seems to me that the better the candidate we run the more desperate the other side will become to make sure they never win. As the article stated to loose even one house would insure they were then in big trouble probably in a legal sense.
lying cheaters who will not shrink from rigging votes in a close election? Yes.
Should we try to do something about this? Yes.
Did Al Gore actually carry his home state of Tennessee in 2000 but for election fraud? I don’t think so.
I agree that they have the incentives–both the risks from losing and the rewards for winning. And we all know that a large fraction of all elections have traditionally been skewed by traditional means both legal and illegal.
Given all this, I don’t understand why they would look at electronic equipment that is so open to rigging–and is completely audit-proof–yet step back from taking advantage of it when they work so hard in the physical world to skew the results.
The classic de-bunking line against flying saucers and other hypotheses is that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
By any rational measure, the combination of motive, means, opportunity and proven (leaving aside the disputed) track record, the claim that this movement does not fix the elections constitutes the extraordinary claim that requires the extraordinary evidence.
I’m not making claims about what has happened–I’m saying it’s irrational to believe that recent elections have been valid.
will ever be valid unless all points along the chain from the voter to the public certification are monitored appropriately for the type and level of vulnerability at each stage.
Belief in the system is irrational. There isn’t the extraordinary evidence to support the extraordinary claim that it’s valid.
Agreed. As a programmer, I can’t see why everyone thinks that hacking the vote would be so hard. I can devise several scenarios where you could do it for an entire state with a handful of people – say, 10-20 – and even a few where most of the people (all but 1 or 2, say) don’t know what they’re actually doing.
I think there’s one case where the GOP is guaranteed to win in 2006 – we listen to Hideous Hillary and move away from a progressive agenda rather than towards one. We need to run more progressive candidates, so people actually see a clear distinction between the Democrats and the GOP.
I am shocked!
Literally shocked. I have read many of Susanhu’s diaries over at dKos (more recently) and somehow I never would have expected her to be entertaining such thoughts?
Heck, I didn’t know that these ideas got so much eye-balling on Booman Tribune until I looked at a bunch of people’s diaries.
On the freakin’ front page no less?
Whether any of you agree or disagree with this article from the crisis papers (I personally feel that it has it’s merits) I am simply glad that it can be discussed without being labeled as a simply a “conspiracy” and summarily dismissed.
Yes it is a “conspiracy theorists dream”, which I don’t consider myself to be one. But that does not mean it does not merit discussion. Even the most outrageous conspiracies need to be built around truths, and there are a lot of truths to consider conerning the past elections.
>pulling up a chair and getting comfortable<
I think I may like it here at Booman Tribune… lol
Glad to have you here. I think you’ll like it, too. 🙂
I am glad you found out we can discuss many things here. Stay!
Well I don’t have a tinfoil hat and I don’t think that the Republicans stole the elections. They didn’t have to, because the electorate simply didn’t vote for Gore or Kerry. Kerry, in particular, should have been able to win by 20% at least, but even the most optimistic pre-election polls put him even with Bush.
The fact is that the Democratic Party doesn’t have a platform that people can get behind. Clinton was hardly a Democrat, and Carter only got elected because of backlash from Watergate. The last time we elected a Democratic president was Johnson, and that was a long, long time ago, in 1966.
The GOP will win in 2006 unless the Democratic party leadership gets its act together and puts up a good candidate with a good platform.
And you may be right. I felt the math experts from MIT and Cal Tech who are way smarter than I had a very valid point. But that aside. Do you not think to save themselves the Neo-cons would not hesitate to use voter fraud in the next election? They have lied and cheated on every single thing they have ever done in office so to me it sets a pecedence. And you are so correct we need to have better people running for office. But again I point to what I said before the better the candidate the more likely they are to use fraud to beat them. Until we remove the ability to use vote tampering we will never be safe.
Either that or some are partners, either by silence or by being in cahoots, in the corruption. People go on about leftists versus centrists in the dem party, but that simplifies what is more complicated. Why are Biden and Lieberman the spokespeople so often for the dem party? Isn’t it likely that they are invited by the corporate media because they are corporate tools? They are, perhaps, not so centrist as beholden. Rather than take a truly good look at things like voter fraud and DSM a goodly number of dems hide from the implications. They don’t want to admit that they might have been stampeded into voting for the Iraq war because of lies, and they don’t want to admit how easy it is to manipulate the votes. Why not? Where is their courage? Why is it so easy to talk about conspiracy buffs rather than just CHECK IT OUT?
The short answer is that the Republicans have a disciplined party that works out its differences in the backrooms before presenting the candidates.
The Democrats are a loose confederation of politicians with different view and no structural mechanism for developing a major platform, and no f***ing discipline. As far as I know, the Democrats never established a party position on the bankruptcy bill! This was a clear attack on the middle class.
The Republicans train, groom, assign and finance candidates for critical elections. The Democrats keep hoping that a wealthy but acceptable candidate will walk in the door, and the first question the DCCC asks is how much money they can raise.
Here in Texas the Democratic Party doesn’t even field candidates for state-wide office any more, nor do they field candidates for judicial elections. The latter is because no Democratic candidate for judge can win against the straight-ticket Republicans, so half the ballot is automatically pure Republican. The rot has moved to county and city elections, so there are fewer and fewer Democrats even running. Why waste the time and money to run a losing campaign for a party that is badly out of power and is apparently doing nothing to get back?
Yet Hillary Clinton can go to Houston and get hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions.
This is lack of intelligent effort. The Democrats in Texas have rolled over and died.
We need a party with a party platform, with discipline and with decent candidates for every office with reasonable funding. Those are structural issues, not ideological one. It is in structure that the Democrats are failing. The Republicans have learned to put the mechanics together, and can on the margin elect some rather nasty candidates over decent Democratic ones.
Bush over Gore is only an example of what has been happening nation-wide. [Bush over Kerry was a case of incumbency over a challenger during a time of fear.]
The Republicans are gaining power, not losing it. They will until they are stopped.