{"id":969,"date":"2004-12-08T01:36:52","date_gmt":"2004-12-08T09:36:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2004\/12\/oh_those_kooks_and_crazies\/"},"modified":"2004-12-08T01:36:52","modified_gmt":"2004-12-08T09:36:52","slug":"oh_those_kooks_and_crazies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2004\/12\/oh_those_kooks_and_crazies.html","title":{"rendered":"OH, THOSE KOOKS AND CRAZIES"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s worth catching Richard Clarke’s entertaining speech<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> to the New
\nYork Society for Ethical Culture, which he gave last night in an event co-sponosored by Pacifica
\nRadio. The former counterterrorism chief under both Bill Clinton and Georgie Boy had some
\nfunny lines. “If the old Cabinet was a closed circle, this Cabinet,” Clarke said, referring to
\nGeorgie’s new nominees, “is an infinite dot.”
\n

<\/P>
\n

When he got serious, Clarke recommended a slim book by various authors called “Defeating the Jihadists: A Blueprint for Action.”<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> You can
\nbuy it online<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> (proceeds go to
\nThe Century Foundation, which just published it), or you can download it for free<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>.
\n

Also speaking last night was the freelance investigative reporter Greg
\nPalast<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>, who works for the BBC and who used to write a column for The
\nGuardian in London (as one of George Orwell’s successors). “There are kooks and crazies<\/I>
\nout there on the Internet<\/I> who think Kerry won,” he said, italicizing his remarks as in
\nOh my god!<\/I> Palast is one of those maybe not-so-crazy kooks. And the reason, according
\nto this self-described “mainstream guy,” has to do with America’s “apartheid ballot-counting
\nsystem”<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> in the last election.<\/P>
\n

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

I’m not sure whether Palast was serious when he mentioned the letter. But he was serious
\nwhen he said the Times subsequently printed a story headlined “Internet Rumors … Debunked.” I
\nrecall that front-page piece. The online headline is “Vote Fraud
\nTheories, Spread By Blogs, Are Quickly Buried.”<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> Here’s the lede:<\/P>
\n


\n

The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger
\nthrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. “Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked,”
\ntrumpeted a headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org.<\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n

<\/P>
\n

But the very untwitchy Palast emphasizes that the hacked votes in Ohio were not products of
\nthe high-tech “black boxes” vulnerable to hacking that everybody was suspcious of. The hacked
\nvotes were, in fact, the “spoiled” ballots produced by the lousy punchcard machines widely used
\nin black voting districts, a distribution he believes was purposeful.<\/P>
\n

And it is these votes, Palast has written, “the uncounted ballots in Ohio — more than a quarter
\nmillion designated ‘spoiled’ or ‘provisional’ — [that] undoubtedly contain[ed] enough votes to
\noverturn George Bush’s ‘victory’ margin of 136,000.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-969","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-fD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/969\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}