[Newspoetry] Deconstructing Conspiracies that Deny Conspiracy: Introductory Remarks

[Donald L Emerick]

Story: Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried -- By Tom Zeller Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/politics/12theory.html?th
Some Web logs were swift to provide dark theories about the presidential election, but others were just as quick to debunk them.

If I could send this reply to the NYTimes reporter, it would be great -- because then, regardless of whether it is ever read by the reporter, supra, I would have said what I ought to say to the person who has made a mistake.

But, just speaking to the wind, as writing a NewsPoem is, assures me, in some non-causal sense, a relief of mind -- without any possible rectification being thereby invoked -- but not so far as that provocation itself inflicts injuries on me and us.

Blogging -- and I am not sure where one draws the line -- as the NYTimes reporter seems to have done, in some fashion that places sources of truths into infallible positions of authority -- seems to be akin to gossip -- at least as to how the reporter treats it.

But, anyone who follows the many statements, official and ex officio, of THOSE-IN-AUTHORITY (as if this could even be news to you), already knows that those statements are to be treated with the greater skepticism simply because the underlying model of truth, in public service, is not applicable -- not anymore, and maybe it never was, except for an occasional public figure.

The underlying model -- of citizen respect for those in authority over them -- presumes that the official in question adheres loyally, devoutly to the Enlightenment's ideal, of a wholly disinterested officialdom.  There is never any acceptability to any official statement -- nor lawfulness to its accompanying enactment -- that shades itself in wrongfulness -- whether of other-slighting negligence or self-indulging wilfulness.  The Enlightenment only tolerates genuine error and authentic accident, due to the indelible circumstances of that inexhaustible ignorance of the actual truth, which even best efforts in good faith may not overcome, with any of the unquestioning absolutes of (essentially, self-)certainty.

So, what does Zeller actually tell us, factually?  He quotes some of the cathedral politicians -- of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT -- as if thereby those few positions were thereby the only ones of those august institutions, implicitly thereby both unanimous and indisputable.  Those few scholars say, Zeller selectively notes, the bloggers could be wrong because of their interpretations of the data.  Well, Zeller does not even go that far toward honesty.  He does not even remotely hint that any "could be wrong" applies both to his view of the encryption that the proper authority may give to data, or to their expressed views, either.

And, when you look at what he says of the alleged rebuttals, what you find is the typical repression of data, in selectively chosen canards of political wisdom.  For instance, the canard that "These Florida counties in question have been trending more Republican at the presidential level in recent elections."  But, anyone with an eye on the data immediately recognizes that that statement is unanchored by any present view of the present data.  Moreover, it is not even responsive to the "comparable" counties' data disparity: whether or not a county had Opti-Scan voting machinery emerged as an important explanatory variable.  Nothing the first rebuttal group addresses that suggestive finding.

A second story, from the MIT Voting Project, is taken too broadly, as the suggestion that voting irregularities, of the kind that are organized, would be systematic, and thus would exhibit an easily profiled pattern, widespread in character.  But, the flaw in that very premise is the assumption that you have to steal votes everywhere, more or less uniformly.  A look at the Electoral College, and of pre-election polls, would immediately inform even the dullest of Bush followers that stealing all the votes everywhere would be a wasteful crime, inefficient in the extreme.   Dictators may idiosyncratically do that, when there is no one left alive to challenge their vaunted claim to getting 99.9% of the election votes, but America does not yet quite seem to be that far under that kind of despotic and autocratic rule!

So,what is the final capstone denial of any sufficient reason for due inquiry that Zeller gives us?  He says, well, anyway, it is undeniable that Bush did get a popular majority greater than that of Kerry.  But, in as formal a way as possible, I would remind Zeller that Bush did not care a fig about popular majorities four years ago.  All that he cared about was being certified the winner, by whatever means it took to be so certified.  Our presidential election process, after all, is state-based -- and lately, at least, explicitly battle-ground state-oriented.  Hence, there was no reason for Kerry to stimulate turnout in states like California or Illinois or New York, where the majority already favored him quite nicely.  Bush, by contrast, wanted any victory of his, this time, to be backed also by a "popular majority".  So, Bush invested resources in enlarging his side of the turnout in all sorts of places, even when it did not have any material bearing on the Electoral Coll!
 ege vote of that state.  I think one could fairly say that the Bush team, if they had been planning to steal the election, wanted to remove the primary cloud that Gore's so-called "popular majority" cast on the reasonable of questioning the legitimacy of Bush's first term of office.

All in all, the, one wonders why Zeller (ie, the NYTIMES) is so determined not to investigate the facts of the story itself -- but instead is erecting an impenetrable firewall of seemingly plausible excuses for not investigating the story, in the first place.

Denial is always interesting, as a resistance to asking much harder questions, and undertaking more difficult assigmments.  It is an economy, of a kind, for the false consciousness against which St. Marx preached -- when he told us not to be confused by those ever so small differences between essentially trivial matters.  St. Marx directed us to put our eyes on the good as gold in the land, and to see how little of it comes to our own.  What does come to us, falls away from us quickly, as if we were but a brief stopping point, a passageway.  As comparable matters of relative rights, we are always being, as bankers might wont to say, disintermediated, out of those fair shares and the equal justice that is ever due us.

Zeller clicks the jack-boots that kick us out of court, kick us out of sight, dismiss us as unauthorized masses.