If this is true, why didn't they also put the fix in for John McCain? How could they be so forgetful?
Perhaps, since the Republican political juggernaut was fomenting a massive amount of resentment for wars, torture, and the handouts of bailout bonuses to the banking industry, they wanted to let the Democrats (almost) take over. (You know like in the cartoons when the bird hands the dynamite stick with a burning fuse to the coyote?) The conspiracy corner residents, who think that the electronic voting machines permit the Republicans to micro-manage results, might want to take note of the fact that the Democrats--thanks to Joe Lieberman--may not have a filibuster-proof majority after all. Did Rove dream up an "almost, but not quite" style "majority"?
So, if the Republicans can sabotage the Obama program for four years, they can then run a campaign emphasizing that Bush's successor did not accomplish anything and therefore he needs replacement.
If this premise is valid, won't the electronic voting machines be used to further cripple the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, next year?
If, like President Bill Clinton, President Barack Obama has to constantly battle a solid wall of recalcitrant Republican oppositionists, he would go into 2012 with an emaciated accomplishments list, which would set the stage for an "elect someone who will get something done" type Republican campaign against him.
The mainstream press has ignored the issue of the electronic voting machines' reliability factor and so it seems likely they would greet a 2010 Republican "surge" with a shrug and a "the voters confounded the pollsters again" type of spin-cover story.
The possibility that the Republicans could use the kowtowing journalists in the (supposedly) liberal mainstream media to cast Jeb in a variation of a modern Restoration Drama role which would be as likely as your personal skepticism of journalism's reliability factor would permit.
With the help of a complacent press, Jeb could take the podium at the 2012 Republican Convention amid an enthusiastic partisan crowd and a "hear no evil, see no evil" press gallery would conveniently miss the zombie symbolism of the Bush family's return to power.
Recently Smirking Chimp featured a story about the fact that Germany's Supreme Court ruled that electronic voting machines were unreliable.
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/24469
A few days earlier the Bradblog web site (which has been covering the electronic voting machines' poor performance record in test situations) reported that a Georgia Supreme Court ruling established that electronic voting results can not be contested on grounds that voters were thereby disenfranchised.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7445
At this point, it becomes a personal call for each member of this column's audience: If you can discount the 2004 objections, the failed tests stories, the ruling of Germany's Supreme Court and the belief that the Republicans might stoop that low, then you can accept the possibility of a Bush Family return to power in 2012 as a legitimate news story. If you concede all these points then you have to either find a plausible reason for the Republicans not to engineer such a scary scenario or you can start to prepare yourself for the gleeful Rush Limbaugh programs that would be used to (metaphorically) rub salt into the Democrats wounds following a Jeb victory in 2012.
This was just an attempt to provide a speculative Halloween column as entertaining as any of the installments of the Saw movie series. If it turns out to be a prophesy . . . we tried to warn folks about the electronic voting machines, but they didn't listen. If we really wanted to scare you with this column, we'd elaborate on the particulars of just how long Bush's "Forever War" is going to last.
Shakespeare wrote:
'Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world."
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