No Time to Retreat

I’m hearing whispers in blog forum conversations that the exit poll percentages match the final vote percentages in areas where voting took place with a paper trail, and do not match in areas where voting was done on paperless electronic machines. I can’t yet find any hard numbers or analysis, but it’s early, and people were up late last night. I certainly hope it’s true, because I am reluctant to think that 58,000,000 hateful bigots whom I am obliged to call my countrymen decided to proclaim to the world that the torture at Abu Ghraib was acceptable; that killing 100,000 Iraqis, most of them innocent women and children, was a good policy; that there’s nothing wrong with the U.S. unilaterally imposing its will on the rest of the world; that a political party that systematically works to disenfranchise minority voters deserves to be voted for; that it’s fine to destroy the world’s environment in order to make a few phenomenally wealthy white men even richer; and that Americans no longer possess the “decent respect for the opinions of mankind” that Thomas Jefferson once assumed. The more of those votes that turn out to have been supplied by Diebold, the better I’ll feel about my country.

We’ve fought the bastards for four years, and we’ll fight them for the next four – not only the unscrupulous politicians, but the 58,000,000 minus: the greedy corporations, the America-right-or-wrong bigots, and their hateful, lying, homophobic churches. I’ve been criticized for turning a music blog political, but every vote for Republicans is a vote for increased corporate power, and every increase in corporate control tramples the living creative arts further underfoot. You can’t have a healthy artistic scene in this fascist climate. The Bushites will learn that we do not flip-flop.

UPDATE: Apparently the buzz-du-jour on the TV stations (and I don’t get TV, which is one of the nicer things about my life) is all the talking heads’ surprised bemusement about how wrong all the Florida and Ohio exit polls turned out to be. Why it just discredits the whole idea of exit polls, doesn’t it?

Sort of like Florida four years ago, when the exit polls said Gore, and the votes said Bush. Hmmm….

Anyone thinking about it yet?