Since this will be the weekend to contemplate scary nightmares, this column postulates the idea that Jeb Bush will win the 2012 Presidential Election and we’ll throw some “connect-the-dots” items out and let the readers have a chance to frighten themselves into a state of hysterical paralysis.
Most Liberals maintain that George W. Bush’s team (with Karl Rove as the captain calling the plays) stole the 2000 and 2004 elections but somehow didn’t engineer a win for Senator John McCain in 2008.
The way conspiracy liberals tell it; in 2004 the electronic voting machines were used to steal the results in Ohio and that was enough to deliver the win.
If this is true, why didn’t they also put the fix in for John McCain? How could they be so forgetful?
Perhaps, since the Republican political juggernaut was fomenting a massive amount of resentment for wars, torture, and the handouts of bailout bonuses to the banking industry, they wanted to let the Democrats (almost) take over. (You know like in the cartoons when the bird hands the dynamite stick with a burning fuse to the coyote?) The conspiracy corner residents, who think that the electronic voting machines permit the Republicans to micro-manage results, might want to take note of the fact that the Democrats thanks to Joe Lieberman may not have a filibuster-proof majority after all. Did Rove dream up an “almost, but not quite” style “majority”?
So, if the Republicans can sabotage the Obama program for four years, they can then run a campaign emphasizing that Bush’s successor did not accomplish anything and therefore he needs replacement.
If this premise is valid, won’t the electronic voting machines be used to further cripple the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, next year?
If, like President Bill Clinton, President Barack Obama has to constantly battle a solid wall of recalcitrant Republican oppositionists, he would go into 2012 with an emaciated accomplishments list, which would set the stage for an “elect someone who will get something done” type Republican campaign against him.
The mainstream press has ignored the issue of the electronic voting machines’ reliability factor and so it seems likely they would greet a 2010 Republican “surge” with a shrug and a “the voters confounded the pollsters again” type of spin-cover story.
The possibility that the Republicans could use the kowtowing journalists in the (supposedly) liberal mainstream media to cast Jeb in a variation of a modern Restoration Drama role which would be as likely as your personal skepticism of journalism’s reliability factor would permit.
With the help of a complacent press, Jeb could take the podium at the 2012 Republican Convention amid an enthusiastic partisan crowd and a “hear no evil, see no evil” press gallery would conveniently miss the zombie symbolism of the Bush family’s return to power.
Recently Smirking Chimp featured a story about the fact that Germany’s Supreme Court ruled that electronic voting machines were unreliable.
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/24469
A few days earlier the Bradblog web site (which has been covering the electronic voting machines’ poor performance record in test situations) reported that a Georgia Supreme Court ruling established that electronic voting results can not be contested on grounds that voters were thereby disenfranchised.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7445
At this point, it becomes a personal call for each member of this column’s audience: If you can discount the 2004 objections, the failed tests stories, the ruling of Germany’s Supreme Court and the belief that the Republicans might stoop that low, then you can accept the possibility of a Bush Family return to power in 2012 as a legitimate news story. If you concede all these points then you have to either find a plausible reason for the Republicans not to engineer such a scary scenario or you can start to prepare yourself for the gleeful Rush Limbaugh programs that would be used to (metaphorically) rub salt into the Democrats wounds following a Jeb victory in 2012.
This was just an attempt to provide a speculative Halloween column as entertaining as any of the installments of the Saw movie series. If it turns out to be a prophesy . . . we tried to warn folks about the electronic voting machines, but they didn’t listen. If we really wanted to scare you with this column, we’d elaborate on the particulars of just how long Bush’s “Forever War” is going to last.
Shakespeare wrote:
‘Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world.
Now, the disk jockey will play the traditional Halloween carol of Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “Monster Mash.” (Were you expecting him to play the entire “Music to Scare the Hell Out of Your Neighbors” album?) We have to go see if our contact at Playboy can get us into this year’s party at the Mansion. We are afraid that it ain’t gonna happen. Have a “Don’t ever scare me like that again” type week.
Interesting premise, Bob, and no more far-fetched than a dumb rich kid who was drunk until he was 40 (if not later, as well), and failed at everything he tried, somehow becoming Governor of Texas and then President of the US.
The major change since 2004 is that there are now Democratic Governors and Sec’ys of State in place of Republicans in many states, and the unreliability of the Diebold-style machines with proprietary codes has surfaced even in the MSM. People around the country, at various levels, are keeping a closer eye on the votes than they were in 2004 and, I understand, it’s difficult to find someone with sufficient technical knowledge to rig the vote on a large scale who is also a dedicated conservative Republican willing to risk jail to put another Bush in office. (The guy who died in a plane crash a couple of years ago was an anomaly.)
IMO, the Bush name is anathema in politics for at least another 20 years and by that time Jeb will be too old to run. But I’ve been wrong before. When Junior announced in 1999 I saw him give a speech on C-Span and thought, ‘This idiot doesn’t have a chance against McCain.’ Boy, was I out to lunch on that one.
Comment by RS Janes — October 31, 2009 @ 3:54 am