While looking for election results, I came across 72 seconds of footage shot in March 2007. Don't be alarmed by the first face you see.
Sample wingnut reaction (from this past August):
Clips of his debate with Coulter show Franken choosing Hitler as the famous figure he’d most like to have been. He promptly adds that he could thereby prevent the Holocaust, but it is doubtful Franken would take that context into account if Coulter had made the statement.
-- Kathy Shaidle, FrontPageMag
Seriously, wingnuts see different things. And no, they do not get jokes.
Kathy Shaidle may be better known by her blog title: Five Feet of Fury. Perhaps that rings a bell? Happily, Yes!
Is she on The List? She will be momentarily!
(h/t: Paul Schmelzer)
5 comments:
Why we hate Al Franken: A fugue (with punk rock).
I'll say five things in response to your screed.
I agree that our electoral systems cannot reliably handle a race that ends in this much of a statistical dead heat. I, too, have thought that a runoff would have been better.
Using an opinion piece to substantiate your argument doesn't. Particularly considering the source -- the Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Points to you for being upfront about whom you were blockquoting, though.
Since you believe Franken's win "will always be tainted," I was glad to see you said the same thing about Bush 2000.
I wonder if you would have written the same analysis had Colman won. I did not follow the recount process obsessively, so I am not prepared to debate this at length, but it seemed to me from what I did read that there were just as many cherries out there to be picked concerning questionable clumps of votes going the other way. I am also of the view that Coleman's team used at least as many dubious subterfuges during the recount process, and probably more. Finally, it appeared to me that the that the recount process was as open as it could possibly be, and that the right call was made on just about every disputed ballot I saw reproduced on the Strib's website.
I'm not going to argue with your impression of Franken, but I will say that "huge douchebag" does not even come close to describing Norm Coleman. I can only hope the investigations into his past continue. Minnesota and the United States are better off for him not being in office; they'd be better off still with him in jail.
"I wonder if you would have written the same analysis had Colman won. I did not follow the recount process obsessively, so I am not prepared to debate this at length, but it seemed to me from what I did read that there were just as many cherries out there to be picked concerning questionable clumps of votes going the other way. I am also of the view that Coleman's team used at least as many dubious subterfuges during the recount process, and probably more."
I don't know about the "probably more" part, but I would certainly grant that Coleman played the game too (and of course he continues to do so, he's taking this to court.) The thing is, if you had been following the Strib's news coverage you would have seen that the allegations in the WSJ piece were more or less accurate. It is not a piece of conservative spin that there were more re-reported ballot counts the day after election day in the Senate race (by several multiples) than in any other race that was held on that same day (including the Presidential election) and that all the counting mistakes went in his favor. You probably don't think of FOX News as a reliable source of information either but if you look at the linked piece you will see that it is not an opinion piece but rather a news article that discusses how there were a huge amount of misreported ballots in the Senate race, many more than in any other election held that day. Even looking at the Strib (what to me is biased coverage) there was nothing that they could do to hide the facts as Mark Ritchie's rulings consistently indulged Franken's subterfuge and shut down Coleman's.
"Finally, it appeared to me that the that the recount process was as open as it could possibly be, and that the right call was made on just about every disputed ballot I saw reproduced on the Strib's website."
The disputed ballots were a very small part of the recount process that was up for grabs; allowing the "misreported" vote totals to stand as they were reported the day after election day rather than on election day and the canvassing board saying they didn't have the power to look at the actual ballots from those districts to compare with the vote totals was obviously a problem. Then there was the duplicate ballots that were allowed to stand; it may have been an opinion piece but the statement of there being more votes counted than the sign in sheets in 25 of more than 1000 precints was a statement of fact. And then there were the absentee ballots that were going to be allowed in or not; obviously each side picked out batches of absentee ballots that (they thought) would help their vote totals. This was the coup de grace and extended Franken's margin from 40-something to 225. Victory in this arbitrated process is not evidence of subterfuge, but you see a pattern of jump balls that all go in the favor of the party that runs the election each of which was necessary for Franken to overcome what as of election night was a 700 vote lead and it's hard to believe that was sheer coincidence.
Like I said I can't blame Franken for playing the game out, and that in these elections where the vote totals are so close that these are essentially ties (the electoral system simply cannot be good enough that in an election with millions of voters who sometimes make mistakes that a difference of a few hundred votes is anything other than a tie in practice, or with our current state of affairs, a jump ball.) And, my personal animus to Mr. Franken aside, I hope you see the larger picture as I see it, which is that these statistical dead heats are essentially jump balls but that the local politics (even if it is on the part of a few overzealous party activists like the DFLer in a heavily democratic district in the Iron Range who called in an extra 246 votes for Franken the day after the election) are, at least in the few cases of this type of situation that we've seen in recent history, the dominant party in the state where the disputed election is held is the determining factor in who wins.
My personal animumus which mainly comes from my perception of Franken as a carpetbagging New Yorker/Californian who has NYC, LA and DC more in his mind than Minneapolis it's also influenced by the fact that that I knew his son who was in my class at Princeton and who was, in fact, a total douchebag (while this might not be the condemnation in your mind that it is to me, he was a member of the very unsavory University Cottage Club where a group of latinos paid to memorize who the club members are scuttle off to bring club members their monogrammed, maroon napkins, and guests a lowly plain white napkin) and I'm betting the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Beyond that, a victory for Franken equals another vote in the Democratic column and an even more polarized, potentially radical Senate.
Finally, note that I would call these victories more "tainted" than "stolen" since both campaigns go into beg, borrow, steal mode once the electoral jump ball is in the air. I would hope that having seen one very important election go the Republicans way in 2000, a relatively unimportant gubenatorial election in 2004 go to the Democrats, and a moderately important Senate election in 2008 also go to the Democrats that there would be significant bi-partisan support for changing how we vote in this country. The most accurate voting system in the world (at least as far as recording and keeping track of people's votes) is not accurate enough to prevent this kind of political shit-storm when the voting is this close. And recounts only add confusion to the process, they don't resolve it (the gubernatorial election in Washington had 3 different recounts as Democrats got closer to overturning the outcome, and of course in 2000 Bush went all the way to needing a one-of-a-kind non-precedent setting Supreme Court decision to put Florida in the win column. We need to go to either revotes or at the very least instant runoff elections that would in almost all cases that I'm talking about have provided a statistically significant margin of victory.
If you consider Fox News a good source of information and the Strib "biased," I don't guess there's much point in talking about his any further. I'd point you to 538, where Nate Silver has done a number of posts on the recount lately, but I can imagine what you think of him.
As I think I said before, we're in agreement that this election was a tie to the limits of the resolution, and that a runoff election would have been better than this recount nonsense.
We're also agreed that the US electoral systems, in general, are a disgrace. I remember hearing Jimmy Carter being interviewed years back, I think on Fresh Air, and he was asked half-kiddingly if he'd agree to bring his UN team in to supervise the next US elections. He answered seriously, "No," and went on to list half a dozen ways that we do not meet international standards for holding elections.
I have to say: your repeated "carpetbagger" talk and your view/memories of life at Princeton just makes me sad. You're too young to be talking like a cranky old bigot.
By "resolution" I was speaking metaphorically -- I meant in how finely focused the system could be, if that wasn't clear.
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