David Mamet comes to his senses. To a point.
Ex-Chicagoan playwright David Mamet has announced that he is no longer a "brain dread liberal."
Huzzah. Glad to see him coming to his senses.
Of course, he's wrong about one thing: George W. Bush did not steal Florida in 2000, and neither did he steal the election. Rather Al Gore's Democrats labored mightily to do both, with the assistance of the media; until subjective methods began to be used by Democratic election officials (and eventually authorized by partisan Democratic judges, including the majority of the Florida Supreme Court) to ascertain voter "intent," no irregularities of any kind were detected in Florida. Many allegations of minority voter suppression were advanced, but the only actual evidence was that of a strongly Republican Haitian precinct which had to close because it was physically disrupted by Democrat goons. And manual recounts of punch-card elections has always been a notorious opportunity for vote fraud; one Democratic specialist in the area who was dispatched to Florida had boasted that if you can get an election within a hundred votes, he could steal it for you by spoiling enough ballots for the other guy.
And then, of course, there was the networks calling Florida- and effectively the election- for Gore early in the evening, and then waiting hours to correct their mistake even after it became clear that they had miscalculated- thus suppressing the Bush vote all over the nation, and especially on the West Coast- and almost certainly accounting for Al Gore's victory in a popular vote contest Bush had led almost the entire evening.
I hate to admit it, but I doubt that Jack Kennedy's people in Chicago (whether Dick Daley or Sam Giancana or both) actually stole the 1960 election for Nixon, either. Switching the electoral votes of Illinois to the Nixon column in itself would not have been enough to elect him. Besides, in releasing all the Cook County votes all at once (thereby overwhelming the corrupt downstate Republican election officials who were used to a cat-and-mouse game of slowly leaking returns all evening until either they or the Cook County crooks figured out how many votes they had to steal to win), Dick Daley performed a masterstroke. He never did it again- but it was that, and not the infamous cemetary vote, that probably won Illinois for JFK in 1960.
Huzzah. Glad to see him coming to his senses.
Of course, he's wrong about one thing: George W. Bush did not steal Florida in 2000, and neither did he steal the election. Rather Al Gore's Democrats labored mightily to do both, with the assistance of the media; until subjective methods began to be used by Democratic election officials (and eventually authorized by partisan Democratic judges, including the majority of the Florida Supreme Court) to ascertain voter "intent," no irregularities of any kind were detected in Florida. Many allegations of minority voter suppression were advanced, but the only actual evidence was that of a strongly Republican Haitian precinct which had to close because it was physically disrupted by Democrat goons. And manual recounts of punch-card elections has always been a notorious opportunity for vote fraud; one Democratic specialist in the area who was dispatched to Florida had boasted that if you can get an election within a hundred votes, he could steal it for you by spoiling enough ballots for the other guy.
And then, of course, there was the networks calling Florida- and effectively the election- for Gore early in the evening, and then waiting hours to correct their mistake even after it became clear that they had miscalculated- thus suppressing the Bush vote all over the nation, and especially on the West Coast- and almost certainly accounting for Al Gore's victory in a popular vote contest Bush had led almost the entire evening.
I hate to admit it, but I doubt that Jack Kennedy's people in Chicago (whether Dick Daley or Sam Giancana or both) actually stole the 1960 election for Nixon, either. Switching the electoral votes of Illinois to the Nixon column in itself would not have been enough to elect him. Besides, in releasing all the Cook County votes all at once (thereby overwhelming the corrupt downstate Republican election officials who were used to a cat-and-mouse game of slowly leaking returns all evening until either they or the Cook County crooks figured out how many votes they had to steal to win), Dick Daley performed a masterstroke. He never did it again- but it was that, and not the infamous cemetary vote, that probably won Illinois for JFK in 1960.
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I never studied it any further than that, but that was his story and he said he was there to see it taking place in person. (Wish I could remember that prof's name!)
Al Gore received the most popular votes in 2000, yet, because of 600 or so disputed votes in Florida, lost the election.
President Bush almost suffered a worse fate in 2004. If a mere 60,000 votes switched to Sen. Kerry, than Kerry wins the Electoral College despite the 3.5 million more votes received across the country by President Bush.
A national popular vote also virtually eliminates the likelihood of organized voter fraud. Voter fraud can be a factor today because 600 votes can determine the President. Even with as close an election as 2000, no-one believes that massive voter fraud on the scale of hundreds of thousands of votes can occur.
But as I said, there's an argument to be made. I'm not entirely adverse.