On George Bush and the Election in 2004

I can hear it now: “give it a break, already; Kerry lost”

Or maybe he’s just a loser, I don’t know. This isn’t really about Kerry being president or not. It’s about a book I’m reading by Greg Palast called Armed Madhouse.

Palast details the various problems with the 2004 election and makes a solid case for enough tainted or uncounted votes to account for a Kerry victory. Meaning, I suppose, that Bush was never actually elected president.

All this doesn’t portend nicely for how things will go down in 2008 or 2012 or…

Believe me, that’s really depressing. It means that even if everybody gets to vote, not everybodys vote counts, and some data firm somewhere (owned by a Republican Evangelical Christian) decides whose vote does count. If that is true we’ve failed the generation of the Founding Fathers and what they left us to “protect and defend”.

Chastise Man is vexed. He’s mad as hell. He knows that he now must abandon his limited skill with the turn of a phrase and defer to the closing paragraphs on Palast’s chapter entitled The Con:

…Yet most still voted for him.
What we witnessed on November 2, 2004, was a 59 million strong army of pinheads on parade ready to gamble away their pensions so long as George Bush makes sure that boys kill each other, not kiss; who feel right proud that our uniformed services can kick some scrawny brown people in the ass in some far-off place when we’re mad and can’t find Osama; who can’t bring themselves to vote for a guy with a snooty Boston Accent who’s never been to a NASCAR tractor pull and who certainly thinks anyone who does is a low-Q beer-burping blockhead.

In his vulturous, brain-damaged way, Zell Miller was right: Stand up for Black voters and the redneck boobs will take their revenge. So the election came down to this: Nitwits who think Ollie North’s a hero not a conman, who can’t name their congressman, who believe Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were going steady, who can’t tell Afghanistan from souvlaki stand and, bloated with lies and super-sized fries, clomped to the polls 59 million strong to vent their small-minded hatreds on us all.

I fear the election was an intelligence test that American flunked.”

Chastise Man bows in awe of such a finely-tuned, deadly serious, and so very accurate rant.