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bitchslap ted rall day, volume infinity

Ted Rall on why people hate George Bush.

I want you to guess. Come on, guess what's Ted's number one reason for hating George Bush. Three guesses, the first two don't count.

Bush is guilty of a single irredeemable act so heinous and anti-American that Nixon's corruption and Reagan's intellectual inferiority pale by comparison. No matter what he does, Democrats and Republicans who love their country more than their party will never forgive him for it.
Bush stole the presidency.

This is after he goes through various other reasons why some people hate the President, and all the usual keywords are present: stupid, AWOL, frat boy, ignorant; and, of course, all the usual blatherings about people disappearing in the middle of the night and Jose Padilla and the concentration camp that is Gitmo.

Hey, Ted? Jose Padilla is a terrorist and traitor. Just so you know.

[M]ost Americans now consider Bush to be no more legitimate than Saddam Hussein, who also came to power in a coup d'état.

Well, let's see. Saddam had no one else on the ballot. Saddam had thugs at the voting boths, whose machine guns and stoney glares reminded you what you were there to do. Saddam had the same thugs going from house to house, dragging people out to vote, making sure that every ballot had his name checked off by every voting-elligible citizen in Iraq.

So, quite the difference there. But Rall and his buddies just love playing up that Bush=Saddam angle, almost as much as the Indymediates love playing up the Bush=Hitler meme.

In case Ted is unaware, this is what the 2000 electoral map looks like. While the majority of the states are red, there are quite a few blue states, leading one to believe that this wasn't so much of a coup d'état as a contested election.

Now, before you start criticizing me for being a Bush flag-waver, note this: I did not vote for Bush in the 2000 election. Yet, I was able to move on and accept him as my president without becoming mired in the slinging mud that's been thrown for too many years now.

I can say with some certainty that there are several ways in which I think Bush could be doing a better job as president. However, I'm not the kind of person who can spend four years, or maybe more, obessing over the fact that my candidate did not win.

One might think that Rall is just a four-trick pony; 2000 election, SUVS, the Ashcroftian Boot of Dissent Crushing and Quagmire! [which covers all aspects of both Iraq and Afghanistan]

Looks like today it was election time, seeing as that last week he covered SUVs.

Two months after 9/11, when Bush's job approval rating was soaring at 89 percent, 47 percent of Americans told a Gallup poll that he had not won the presidency legitimately. "The election controversy...could make a comeback if Bush's approval ratings were to fall significantly," predicted Byron York in The National Review.

The election controversy making a comeback? To Rall, this is the equivalent of middle-aged woman realizing that bellbottoms are back, going through her old trunks of clothes with glee. Except the clothes are faded, they don't fit quite the same and middle-aged woman just shouldn't wear wide bellbottoms.

If the controversy does come back, Rall would have outlived his usefulness in the whole topic. He has already written hundreds of articles and drawn a hundred comics on the subject of The Stolen Election. His jokes are faded, his cliches worn out. Hackneyed columnists shouldn't try to rehash those heady days of 2000. Rall will end up looking like a mid-life crisis woman in go-go boots and hot pants.

But I bet when he's in his room alone at night, Ted Rall lies in bed and fantasizes about a media frenzy bringing the 2000 election back into the limelight. And what will Rall be muttering under the covers?

To quote the dear Captain Murphy, My nipples are hard just thinking about it.

Sorry about that imagery.

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WHY WE HATE BUSH: It's the Stolen Election, Stupid (Via Michele) Bush is guilty of a single irredeemable act so heinous and anti-American that Nixon's corruption and Reagan's intellectual inferiority pale by comparison. No matter what he does, Democrat... [Read More]

» Democratic? from Modern Life is Rubbish
While catching up on a bit of blog reading this afternoon I came across this Ted Rall-inspired post at A Small Victory and more specifically a map (or two) showing how the distribution of votes worked out in the last... [Read More]

Comments

HA! I wondered when that collection of stupidity would get the proper attention it deserved under the heading "Bitch Slap Ted Rall".

My favorite part is "Bush ended all that, suing to stop a ballot count that subsequent newspaper recounts proved he had lost. "

Last I knew, every subsequent recount showed the exact opposite, that there was never any way Gore would have won, whether the recount had gone on or not.

Nothing like an out and out lie to support your case. But with Rall, it's an easy leap of faith - If the facts don't support you, just make some up!!

Sherard is right.....

Remember the multi-organization effort to do an exhaustive recount of the Florida votes? Remember when the results of that effort were made public? You may not, because it didn't get much press. That's because, no matter how they chose to count the state's presidential ballots (excluding the disputed 'chad' ballots, etc.), Bush received more votes than Gore in the state of Florida. The total, if I remember correctly, was right around the 540 that it was when the first recounts came through in the weeks immediately after the election.

You could hear the media's disappointment. You can bet they had articles prepared the same way they do for obituaries of famous figures. What you couldn't hear was a lot of publicity about the findings. But of course, you can't have a reasoned argument with the likes of Rall or anyone else on the Angry Left.

Sickening.....

WG, LI

Algore pressured Florida vote-counters via the FL Supreme Court to have votes recounted in only the districts that would have benefitted Democrats,

Leftists implied that FL voters were too stupid or too distracted to properly vote,

Leftists also tried to throw out absentee votes, citing technical mistakes on the ballots themselves made by bumbling overseas military voters,

It took an act of the US Supreme Court to stop Algore's lawsuit, and allow FL's existing vote count to stand,

Major newspapers verified that a recount, if held, still would have favored Bush,

yet Bush stole the election. Riiiight.

A couple of links to follow up on my comment above:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/02/26/politics/main274495.shtml

http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/02/26/miami.herald.recount/

http://www.theindependent.com/stories/040501/opi_ayoub05.html

The Miami Herald, CBS News, CNN and The 'Independent' gave these reports. The various iterations of how the votes were counted are spelled out in the last link.

I know, Dems, it's still a huge conspiracy from the right-wing media..

WG, LI

You want to see a really startling election 2000 map? Get a load of this one.

There's a reason we have an electoral college. It's the same reason we have a Senate: to prevent the most densely-populated areas of the country from dominating the less-populaced areas.

Al Gore lost, and he lost fair and square, in Florida and in most of the rest of the country. And he lost not because of cheating, but because he and his party could not convince most voters in most of the country that he was the right man for the job. Instead he won the wealthiest, most affluent, most densely-populated parts of the country, and lost everywhere else.

The blame for which falls squarely on him, his campaign, and his party, and not on anyone else.

I can say with some certainty that there are several ways in which I think Bush could be doing a better job as president.

Please, share.

Jose Padilla is a terrorist and traitor.

That's for a court to decide. We have a system for stuff like this. We've had it for over 200 years. It was able to handle Rosenberg, Walker, and Ames, so why the need to do anything differently with Padilla?

Irrespective of whether Bush won fair and square, Al Gore was robbed, or the result reflected the nation's viting intention, what did suffer in the 2000 Presidential election was the perception of an open, transparent and incorruptable voting system. Bush won the election, and no amount of bellyaching by sore losers will change that.

The legitimacy of a democracy is founded on whether the members of that democracy percieve the democratic process is fair and whether people believe that their voting intentions at the ballot box are reflected in the actual results. Note I said "perceive". The process may well give the correct results, but I need to be convinced that it does.

The media images of hanging chads, legal challenges to counts, allegations of faulty voter rolls, and so on contribute to the perception that the voting process is flawed. Unfortunately, it appears that the various election administrators across the nation are setting themselves up for even greater chellenges to the openness and integrity of the ballot process with the Diebold voting machine fracas. It appears that these machines - which are very popular and used in many States - are open to vote tampering and leave no independant audit trail of votes.

A question though - what is wrong with the old fashioned, paper ballot that gets placed in the sealed ballot box? Canada uses them. Australia uses them. Why the fixation with technology that seems ripe for fraud?

the interesting thing about 2000 is not Florida, it's the other states (such as New Mexico which was a CLOSER election then FL) and certain cities (Philadelphia which threw the state to Gore and St Louis which allowed voting booths to remain open in order to throw the state to Gore).

anyone who is still bitching about 2000 will be suicidal when Bush takes 40+ states in 04.

Ken,
the problem with the paper ballot is that there are too many people voting to make it feesible. unfortunate though, they would make life a lot easier... as for the process of election transparancy, people get over it and move on. (ie. nixon/kennedy)

Hey, don't forget, we have to get over 9/11. But some people will be holding on to Vietnam and Election 2000 for the rest of their miserable lives.

Whether it be Ted Rall, or Jill Nelson, or Michael Moore, there will always, ALWAYS, be those folks who steadfastly maintain that Bush stole the election. They will rant, and they will rave, and they will bark at the moon, and moon tree bark, but they will never be convinced otherwise. I pulled the lever for Gore, but I know enough about the Constitution and the electoral college to acquiesce that I chose the losing guy. I also have enough common sense to know that, even after upteen-million Florida recounts, Bush would have still come out ahead. For some, however, that pill is just too jagged to swallow, so they continue to spit out the "stolen election" mantra. Let them chant, I say. It just makes them sound all the more stupid.

Rip Ford,

I am not certain about the "too many people voting" to make paper ballots workable. Sure, in a country of 250 million people, the numbers that turn out to vote are higher than in Canada or Australia - but there are a commensurately greater pool of people to employ temporarily as poll workers to count the votes.

I wonder if our desire for "instant gratification" has a part in this - we don't want to wait a day or two for the ballots to be counted and verified?

Michele,

You shouldn't post things like:

My nipples are hard just thinking about it.

Now I have an image of your hard nipples etched in my mind. I can no longer concentrate on work,

)>
)>

There's another way to deal with paper ballots (which is the way I voted in Wake County, NC) -- optical scanning machines. When I voted, I completed an arrow pointing to my choice, just connecting tail to tip. Then fed the ballot through a scanner. These ballots are counted when fed into the machines, thus fulfilling instant gratification, and are easy to recount, fulfilling transparency. Who says we can't have it all ways?

Ken, thanks!!! My sentiments exactly.

Michele writes, "Sorry about that imagery".

Sorry!?!?!! No, no, THANK YOU !!!

8^)

Whoa Nellie!

oh...and Ted Rall is an asshat.

1. What Ken said.

2. Rall is not only an asshat, but he has been and will remain an asshat until the day he finally molders into dust. I've been arguing with him since the days of BBSs and he has an uneducable mind. "America is bad and all things American are worse" is his only mantra. Seeing that he came to cartooning from a failed career as an inner-city social worker, should we expect much else?

I know that ignoring him won't make him go away, but short of taking a contract out on him, it's probably the most sane thing to do. Let the people who buy into his bile have their full dose. They're irredeemable anyway.

I consider myself to be a pretty nice guy. My wife and children and dog love me, I try to treat people in a nice way, and try to keep my customer happy.

It is not often that I wish someone would eat broken glass, get peritonitis and die a slow and painful death, but that's what I feel about Ted Rall.

MonkeyPants
Imperial Lizeroid Trainer