Hating My Conspiracy-Minded Fellow Dems!

Here's the first of what I suspect will be a lot of new items from me. I wrote this in response to the tidal wave of Floridians I met, both during and after the campaign, who insist on believing that the big problems in front of us have something to do with electronic voting machines.

Here's my problem:

1. There was more real-time scrutiny on the Florida vote this year than any other election in the history of the world.
2. There are hundreds of Democratic party officials with a huge vested interest in the results of the election and tons of financial and other resources available to build a case for fraud or conspiracy.

Unless you believe that the conspiracy encompasses the Democrats themselves, then I have zero time to devote to looking at any individual's unscientific analysis of the results. I have become so unbelievably frustrated with people who pursue this line of thinking that I almost want to shake people at this point. We have to open our eyes and get pissed off at the bigger-picture issue here: we are staring into the face of a manipulated America, and we have to figure out a way to counteract that manipulation.

My big point is that it's not votes that are being manipulated--it's people's minds. The Right has done a McCarthy-esque job on the folks in this country who have traditionally done an excellent job of defending impartiality and objective truth. By pounding away at the "traditional media" and the "liberal elite," the Right has successfully destroyed any faith that average Americans once had in the reliability and the motivations of the people involved in these institutions--never mind that the fundamental makeup and tenor of these institutions hasn't really changed since the days of Cronkite. Many people--perhaps most people--in this country now believe that objective truth is impossible even to approximate, and that inherently biased individuals are incapable of producing an unbiased, professional news product.

To complement this undermining of traditional sources of objectivity, the Right has worked to elevate individuals like Rush Limbaugh and organizations like Fox News into alternative positions of authority. With Fox News, there is rarely even the acknowledgement from conservative pundits that it is in fact a purposefully biased source of "news." With Limbaugh, the shift is incomplete, but there has been a blurring in the same direction. While many conservatives still admit that he's a strongly-biased entertainer and not a news man, Limbaugh himself relentlessly uses words like "truth" and "right," and most of his listeners no longer make a distinction between his agenda and the agenda of, say, the New York Times.

This is one of the fundamental reasons why we lost the election, and this is what I want people to spend their energy thinking about and working against!

- posted by John @ 8:31 PM