OH, THOSE KOOKS AND CRAZIES

It's worth catching Richard Clarke's entertaining speech to the New York Society for Ethical Culture, which he gave last night in an event co-sponosored by Pacifica Radio. The former counterterrorism chief under both Bill Clinton and Georgie Boy had some funny lines. "If the old Cabinet was a closed circle, this Cabinet," Clarke said, referring to Georgie's new nominees, "is an infinite dot."

When he got serious, Clarke recommended a slim book by various authors called "Defeating the Jihadists: A Blueprint for Action." You can buy it online (proceeds go to The Century Foundation, which just published it), or you can download it for free.

Also speaking last night was the freelance investigative reporter Greg Palast, who works for the BBC and who used to write a column for The Guardian in London (as one of George Orwell's successors). "There are kooks and crazies out there on the Internet who think Kerry won," he said, italicizing his remarks as in Oh my god! Palast is one of those maybe not-so-crazy kooks. And the reason, according to this self-described "mainstream guy," has to do with America's "apartheid ballot-counting system" in the last election.

Palast talks about the "spoiled" ballots in black communities in Ohio that were never counted as just the tip of the iceberg, a mere surface indication of Republican attempts to disenfranchise black voters through illegal manipulation and/or technical challenges. He said that after he and others brought this to light he received a letter from The New York Times asking if he was 1) "a conspiracy nut" and 2) "a sore loser."

I'm not sure whether Palast was serious when he mentioned the letter. But he was serious when he said the Times subsequently printed a story headlined "Internet Rumors ... Debunked." I recall that front-page piece. The online headline is "Vote Fraud Theories, Spread By Blogs, Are Quickly Buried." Here's the lede:

The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. "Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked," trumpeted a headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org.

But the very untwitchy Palast emphasizes that the hacked votes in Ohio were not products of the high-tech "black boxes" vulnerable to hacking that everybody was suspcious of. The hacked votes were, in fact, the "spoiled" ballots produced by the lousy punchcard machines widely used in black voting districts, a distribution he believes was purposeful.

And it is these votes, Palast has written, "the uncounted ballots in Ohio -- more than a quarter million designated 'spoiled' or 'provisional' -- [that] undoubtedly contain[ed] enough votes to overturn George Bush's 'victory' margin of 136,000."

December 8, 2004 1:36 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
more picks

Sites to See

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on December 8, 2004 1:36 AM.

COLIN POWELL'S NEW RAP was the previous entry in this blog.

THE FLAKY REV. FALWELL is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.