My latest open letter to MSNBC, and to professional pundits everywhere:
What is wrong with every last one of you? You're still doing that thing that has driven me completely nuts since you started doing it in 2000: you keep acting like the outcomes of elections, especially national ones, always, de-facto, reflect the will of the electorate. The truth is that Obama will only win if it's a total blowout like it was in 2008. The truth is that the Rove-designed and Rove-spearheaded vote theft machine can only steal elections if it can keep the winner's margin to around 10%, give or take. Anybody who can read, has an internet connection, and gives a damn knows that by now. Except you. Either that are you really are the totally owned pack of corporate whores everybody says FOX is. God I don't want to believe that. Dear Lord I don't want to believe that.
It was sickeningly blind, and unforgivably ignorant enough 12 years ago. Now, when you've had the same chance the rest of us have had, to look long and hard at just how thoroughly, and completely, some very, very bad people have removed that once-magical one man one vote power from We The People you insist on believing still exists, and replaced it with this debauchery instead, you're as blind, and ignorant as ever.
MSNBC, I love you all. Your attempt to respond to the disgusting mess that FOX has been offering up for so long with principled, intelligent journalism has been so encouraging. You've done so, so beautifully. This election cycle, at least you've covered the current GOP strategies to "win" whether they've actually won or not. It's pretty infuriating the way most of your coverage contains the pretense that it's somehow a new thing, but at least you're not pretending it isn't happening any more. Thank God for that much. But for all that admirable but probably too late effort, there you all still are, with those stars still firmly covering your eyes, or with an almost credible pretense at it. It fills me with despair. I KNOW you're not stupid enough to still believe it. The only other conclusions available to me are almost more than I can even contemplate.
I could have sent you a dozen credible reasons I'm right about this. I settled on this one; an article more than 5 years old:
"Poll shock in Ohio: Off by 40 points, newspaper's predictions may be disturbingly accurate'Posted on Friday, November 25 @ 09:04:55 EST
One of the most wildly inaccurate pre-election polls in memory, which was off by over 40 points on some predictions, may prove to be deadly accurate as an indicator of the problems we face as a nation with our voting process -- and democracy itself ... [snip]... there's a story here that must not be allowed to vanish.
The story is about how America votes, and evidence that pandemic chaos and perhaps even centrally orchestrated malfeasance are accompanying the spread of electronic voting machines to the nation's precincts. We know there's cause to worry about the state of our democracy because of the historical accuracy of the Columbus Dispatch voter poll ... [snip]
Why, I wonder, in a state that made a national spectacle of itself with widespread irregularities and voter disenfranchisement a year ago, would there be so little interest in investigating whether the "voting chaos" reported by the Toledo Blade or the "night of surprises" reported by the Dayton Daily News could have produced tainted results? ... [snip] ...
But the spark won't jump in the media mind. You know: Hmm, we have widespread confusion in the voting process, a recent GAO report that cites many glaring insecurities in e-voting, and our own polls indicating big victories that turn into big defeats. Could it be ...? Nah! What are we thinking? This is the world's greatest democracy."