Black Box Presidency
The Hill quotes an unnamed Secret Service source as saying that the box-shaped bulge under Bush's jacket at the debates was a strap for a bulletproof vest, a secret the Secret Service didn't want to reveal during the campaign, when the president was exposed to potential assassins out on the campaign trail.
Oddly, though, the president never seemed to have his bulgy protective strap on when he spoke at huge campaign rallies in his shirtsleeves -- though he's donned it for assassin-free zones, such as the East Room of the White House. Perhaps the Secret Service was speaking figuratively. It seems unlikely, though, that the Secret Service would ask that Bush lie about the device on television, as he did when he told ABC's Charles Gibson that he was "embarrassed" to say that it was just a wrinkle in his shirt.
The New York Times reports in tomorrow's paper (Nov 8) that the Secret Service won't comment on the question. The Times story doesn't point out that The Hill's attempt at Bush-buffing doesn't even make sense: Presidential body armor is hardly a secret, and how exactly would keeping it quiet help deflect attempts on the president's life? Wouldn't it have the reverse effect? Not to mention that people who know what bulletproof vests look like, i.e. actual soldiers, say there's no body armor in the world with that Rube Goldberg configuration.
I apologize for repeating myself, but what's a blogger to do when respectable journalists at the Times are more intent on writing entertainingly than on providing readers with all the relevant facts?
So, here we are, a month and two days after we first broached the question of Bush's wire (Oct 5). Nothing has changed except that a few more people know about the fraud. But most major news media seem to prefer that the people be protected from this knowledge. They wish they didn't know it themselves. Soviet-style, newspapers around the country ran Doonesbury's strips on the Bush prompter without investigating their premise. How did they expect their readers to know what the strips were about, and whether or not they amounted to fair criticism or dishonest slurs?
More details on thefailure to report the story by two major papers: According to Dave Lindorff, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward advised the NASA scientist who analyzed the video images of Bush's box to take the story to Salon, since he wouldn't be able to get it past his own editors before Nov. 2. And the New York Times killed a story scheduled for October 28 by reporters William Broad and John Schwarz because, Lindorff says, the Times feared that printing the news might influence the election. Of course, failing to inform the public also influenced the election, as the voters pathetically quoted in the Times as having chosen Bush because they felt he was "honest," demonstrate.
Certainly the hosts at NBC's "Democracy Plaza" (sadly, no more) whose hosts cited approvingly the ordeal of Ohioans waiting in line for hours to vote, weren't about to bring up questions about the president's honesty. That wouldn't fit with the cheery Disney script of democracy, any more than would a mention ofleaky Diebold electronic voting machines , which reportedly use a code a ten-year-old could hack. Not to mention the voting irregularities , including incidents in several battleground states where Kerry voters found touchscreen machines repeatedly registering their votes for Bush.
Vote fraud isthe sinister explanation , of course, for why raw exit polls wrongly omened a Kerry win nationally and in many states. The men who conducted the NEP polls for the networks and AP have explained the variance as likely due to greater eagerness by Kerry voters to talk to pollsters. Which makes sense -- except that it can't explain why Bush's large vote gains over the exit poll numbers occurred mainly in battleground states. Wouldn't Kerry voters be just as responsive -- and Bush voters just as reticent -- in Arizona or Connecticut? [Update Nov. 12: A U Penn professor's analysis places the odds at 250 million to one that the anomalous exit polls in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania were due to chance alone.]
In Venezuela's and other foreign elections,exit polls are seen as a check on possible fraud . Here that possibility was discarded a priori, perhaps because of Karl Rove's reputation for honest dealing. Steve Coll of the Washington Post suggested in an online chat that it seemed likelier that all the exit polls were wrong than that a large conspiracy hacked the election. But who said it would take a large conspiracy? Experts have warned for years that anyone with a home computer and inexpensive software could break into electronic voting tabulators. It may already have happened in one state. Read this shocking, carefully-reported piece in the UK Guardian. Using machines that are modem-equipped and that create no paper trail is like leaving a open bag of cash on a subway bench. It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to say that someone will make off with it sooner or later.
I await the explanations of experts likemysterypollster.com , who can parse these contradictory exit polls further -- and I'll correct what I've written here accordingly. But for more on how to have an election whose results we can unreservedly trust the next time around, check out openvotingconsortium.org , demos-usa.org , verifiedvoting.org , and blackboxvoting.org .
That's if for IsBushWired. Barring developments, our story is done. We'll leave the page up for latecomers interested in knowing the full story. And feel free to write: isbushwired@gmail.com
Oddly, though, the president never seemed to have his bulgy protective strap on when he spoke at huge campaign rallies in his shirtsleeves -- though he's donned it for assassin-free zones, such as the East Room of the White House. Perhaps the Secret Service was speaking figuratively. It seems unlikely, though, that the Secret Service would ask that Bush lie about the device on television, as he did when he told ABC's Charles Gibson that he was "embarrassed" to say that it was just a wrinkle in his shirt.
The New York Times reports in tomorrow's paper (Nov 8) that the Secret Service won't comment on the question. The Times story doesn't point out that The Hill's attempt at Bush-buffing doesn't even make sense: Presidential body armor is hardly a secret, and how exactly would keeping it quiet help deflect attempts on the president's life? Wouldn't it have the reverse effect? Not to mention that people who know what bulletproof vests look like, i.e. actual soldiers, say there's no body armor in the world with that Rube Goldberg configuration.
I apologize for repeating myself, but what's a blogger to do when respectable journalists at the Times are more intent on writing entertainingly than on providing readers with all the relevant facts?
So, here we are, a month and two days after we first broached the question of Bush's wire (Oct 5). Nothing has changed except that a few more people know about the fraud. But most major news media seem to prefer that the people be protected from this knowledge. They wish they didn't know it themselves. Soviet-style, newspapers around the country ran Doonesbury's strips on the Bush prompter without investigating their premise. How did they expect their readers to know what the strips were about, and whether or not they amounted to fair criticism or dishonest slurs?
More details on the
Certainly the hosts at NBC's "Democracy Plaza" (sadly, no more) whose hosts cited approvingly the ordeal of Ohioans waiting in line for hours to vote, weren't about to bring up questions about the president's honesty. That wouldn't fit with the cheery Disney script of democracy, any more than would a mention of
Vote fraud is
In Venezuela's and other foreign elections,
I await the explanations of experts like
That's if for IsBushWired. Barring developments, our story is done. We'll leave the page up for latecomers interested in knowing the full story. And feel free to write: isbushwired@gmail.com
