NP - Did Putin Swing the Election to Trump? Of Course He Did.

[Mark Thibodeau]

Getting back to the OP, it reminds me in tone and structure of
something similar that I wrote a while back in response to Richard
Cohen's WaPo savaging of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, for all the
wrong reasons. I called it "Requiem for a Self-Loathing Liberal" and
it began:

What follows is a methodical deconstruction and rebuttal of a recent
column by Washington Post scribe Richard Cohen.

>>I brought a notebook with me when I went to see Michael Moore's
>>Fahrenheit 9/11 and in the dark made notes before I gave up,
>>defeated by the utter stupidity of the movie.

Ooh! The utter stupidity! Strong words. Let's see if Cohen can cash that check.

>>One of my notes says 'John Ellis', who is a cousin of George W.
>>Bush and the fellow who called the election for Fox News that dark
>>and infamous night when the presidency -- or so the myth goes --
>>was stolen from Al Gore, delivering the nation to Halliburton, the
>>Carlyle Group and Saudi Arabia, and plunging it into war. A better
>>synopsis of the movie you're not likely to read.

Someone should send Cohen a dictionary, because unless the mountains
of evidence that point towards election fraud (and worse) in Florida
(and elsewhere) during the 2000 elections have all been fabricated, he
seems to have mistaken history for myth.

Furthermore, Cohen must be some kind of super-genius, because how any
self-respecting human being could pooh-pooh the flagrant orgy of
profiteering in Iraq -- by special interests with
so-close-they-might-as-well-be-having-sex ties to the Bush
administration -- is far beyond my capacity to comprehend.

That these bitter pills have yet to be fully digested - thanks in
large part to the efforts of America's cowed journalistic
establishment - is no excuse. Cohen has to know better.

>>Ellis appears early in the film, which is not only appropriate
>>but inevitable. He is the personification of the Moore method,
>>which combines guilt by association with the stunning
>>revelation of a stunning fact that has already been revealed
>>countless times before. If, for instance, you did a Lexis-Nexis
>>database search for 'John Ellis' and 'election,' you would be
>>told: 'This search has been interrupted because it will return
>>more than 1,000 documents.' The Ellis story is no secret.

Cohen commits a cardinal sin of journalism, here. Like most in his
profession, he gets paid to winnow through the info-sphere in search
of typing fodder, yet he assumes everybody knows everything he knows.
His contempt for the underinformed is radiant. "You didn't know Bush's
cousin over at Fox News was the one who called the election for him?!
Like, what rock have YOU been living under, maaaan?!"

According to recent studies, fewer than half of adult Americans read
newspapers anymore, much less every story on every page of every
newspaper, magazine and trade journal in the world. Most Americans
rely exclusively on television and (dear Lord) talk radio for their
news. Cohen should try to keep his hipster condescension in check.

I can't help but wonder if you'd asked a hundred random people, prior
to the release of F9/11, how many would have known that the first
person in America to call Florida for Bush was a) a Fox News executive
who b) also happened to be the President's first cousin? After
attending Moore's film, I noticed that Ellis's involvement was one of
the main things people were talking about in the lobby.

Rightly or wrongly, many people were shocked by what was, for them, a
revelation. So the mere fact that the story has been told is no proof
that the issue has been resolved. That over 1,000 documents including
the words 'John Ellis' and 'election' can be found in the vast
Lexis-Nexis archive tells us less than nothing. Although perhaps if
he'd added the words 'cousin' and 'helped to steal' to his search,
Cohen might have learned a thing or two.

>>But more than that, what does it mean?
>>Ellis is a Bush cousin, Moore tells us. A
>>close cousin? We are not told. A cousin
>>from the side of the family that did not get
>>invited to Aunt Rivka's wedding? Could be.
>>A cousin who has not forgiven his relative for
>>a slight at a family gathering -- the cheap gift,
>>the tardy entrance, the seat next to a deaf
>>uncle? No info.

Suddenly, Cohen the impatient know-it-all is Cohen the clueless naif,
begging for more information. Ellis is, in fact, the President's first
cousin.

>>And even if Ellis loved Bush truly and passionately,
>>as a cousin should, how did he manage to change
>>the election results? To quote the King of Siam, is a puzzlement.

Forgive me if I'm boring you with things you already know. I'll try to be brief.

According to Ellis himself, as detailed in the New Yorker, he was in
constant contact with his cousins George and Jeb throughout the night
of the election. Around 6 PM, Voter News Service sent data to all
major news outlets indicating Gore had won a slim but decisive victory
in Florida. Sometime after 7:52 PM, when all major networks (including
Fox) called Florida for Gore, Ellis received another call from cousin
Jeb.

The exact nature of the information Ellis shared with Bush during that
phone call is unclear. Before it was hastily and unceremoniously
dispatched on the day of the 2002 mid-term elections - and I'm sure
Cohen sees no valid reasons for suspicion in that case, either - VNS
provided detailed, district-by-district voter information to their
media clients. John Ellis was one such client.

Is it "stupid" to consider the possibility that Ellis might have
shared information about the breakdown of the Florida vote with Jeb,
the Republican governor of that state, who also happened to be the
Republican candidate's brother, and whose Secretary of State was
Katherine Harris, who a) was in charge of Florida's elections, b) was
co-chairwoman of the Florida "Bush for President" committee, c) was a
Bush delegate during the Republican National Convention, and d)
imperiously halted a legal recount that was slowly-but-surely eating
away at Bush's bullshit, razor-thin lead?

All things considered, is it "stupid" to speculate whether there
exists a possibility that Jeb might have been able to somehow use the
information he got from Ellis - in combination with his substantial
power as Florida's chief executive - to alter the outcome of the
election?

Perhaps it's just me. Perhaps I'm paranoid.

Perhaps there was nothing strange about Team Bush taking the
historically unprecedented step of holding a living room press
conference in the midst of the election - not too long after that
phone call to Ellis, come to think of it - to assure Americans that,
despite the now-defunct Voter News Service's previously impeccable
track record in these matters, Florida was still in play.

Perhaps the subsequent, near-immediate and highly atypical surge in
Bush's favor - forcing VNS and the news media to retract their call
for Gore and label Florida "too close to call" - was coincidence.

Perhaps there was nothing untoward about Ellis's 2 AM conversation
with Jeb and George Bush, of which he later boasted: "It was just the
three of us guys handing the phone back and forth - me with the
numbers, one of them a governor, the other the president-elect. Now
that was cool."

Perhaps there is nothing suspicious in the fact that Ellis shortly
thereafter got Fox to call Florida for Bush, at a time when his lead
over Gore was rapidly evaporating. Perhaps the other networks followed
Fox's lead because it was late, they were tired, and they'd had enough
already. Perhaps General Electric CEO Jack Welch had nothing to do
with it.

Perhaps everybody should follow Cohen's lead and not care a fig about
any of this, lest we be labeled "stupid", "silly" or "loony", like
Michael Moore. But enough of my wild-eyed, incoherent ranting. Let's
get back to the task at hand.

>>I go on about Moore and Ellis because the stunning
>>box-office success of Fahrenheit 9/11 is not, as proclaimed,
>>a sure sign that Bush is on his way out but is instead a
>>warning to the Democrats to keep the loony left at a safe distance.

Bush's plummeting approval ratings in the days since the film's
release must surely stand as affirmation of Cohen's thesis.

>>Speaking just for myself, not only was I dismayed by
>>how prosaic and boring the movie was -- nothing new
>>and utterly predictable -- but I recoiled from Moore's
>>methodology, if it can be called that. For a time, I hated
>>his approach more than I opposed the cartoonishly
>>portrayed Bush. The case against Bush is too hard
>>and too serious to turn into some sort of joke, as Moore has done.

That Cohen could be "dismayed" to the point of "recoiling" with "hate"
over a film that he immediately thereafter characterizes as "a joke"
seems odd to me. Then again, I have a strong suspicion that Bush stole
the election, so what do I know?

>>The danger of that is twofold: It can send fence-sitters
>>moving, either out of revulsion or sympathy, the other way,
>>and it leads to an easy and facile dismissal of arguments
>>critical of Bush. During the Vietnam War, it seemed to me
>>that some people supported Richard Nixon not because
>>they thought he was right but because they loathed the
>>war protesters. Beware history repeating itself.

The hand-wringing, self-loathing blather of marshmallow liberals like
Cohen - who helps counter the lies and propaganda of the conservative
movement's 24/7 noise machine by penning absurdly over-the-top
denunciations of an independently-produced film that has yet to be
refuted on a single point of fact - is far more helpful to Bush than
any film Michael Moore could ever produce. That he could accuse Moore
of indulging in "easy and facile dismissal of arguments" after filing
his own easy and facile dismissal of Moore's arguments tells me that
Cohen, as we used to say back home, is deaf to the sounds of his own
flatulence.

>>Moore's depiction of why Bush went to war is so silly
>>and so incomprehensible that it is easily dismissed. As
>>far as I can tell, it is a farrago of conspiracy theories. But
>>nothing is said about multiple U.N. resolutions violated
>>by Iraq or the depredations of Saddam Hussein.

I must be certifiably insane for even suggesting this, but perhaps
Moore felt that bringing up Iraq's past non-compliance with various
United Nation resolutions was unnecessary. And perhaps he felt it was
unnecessary because a) Saddam was granting U.N. weapons inspectors
access to every square inch of Iraq, b) the Bush administration's
"evidence" that Saddam was in breech of anti-WMD resolutions turned
out to be a tissue of lies, and c) the United Nations tried
desperately to prevent Bush from launching his illegal, disastrous and
pathetically bungled businessman's war of first resort.

Would it be "prosaic" of me to suggest that the Bush administration
became increasingly belligerent and insistent as the organization
whose resolutions he had taken it upon himself to enforce (against its
will) was systematically dismantling their case for war?

>>In fact, prewar Iraq is depicted as some sort of Arab folk
>>festival -- lots of happy, smiling, indigenous people. Was
>>there no footage of a Kurdish village that had been gassed?
>>This is obscenity by omission.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is not about Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It's about Bush's
America. Cohen seems to fault Moore for failing to create an
impartial, academic, encyclopedically authoritative dissertation on
the preceding two decades of American foreign policy. He might as well
fault Moore for failing to point out that "Clinton thought Saddam was
a bad guy, too."

Furthermore, I suspect that if Moore had chosen to show images of
Saddam's infamous and oft-referenced 1988 gas attack on Halabja -
explaining the context of the Iraqi Kurds' treasonous alliance with
Iran, against whom Iraq was waging a savage and protracted war of
attrition with America's blessing and weapons - Cohen would have
accused him of obscenity by inclusion.

>>The case against Bush need not and should not rest
>>on guilt by association or half-baked conspiracy
>>theories, which collapse at the first double take but
>>reinforce the fervor of those already convinced.

It was at this point in his screed that I began to suspect Cohen had
actually not seen Fahrenheit 9/11 at all, having perhaps wandered into
a matinee showing of Disney's Around the World in 80 Days by mistake.
I honestly have no idea which "half-baked conspiracy theories" he
could possibly mean.

Surely he can't be dismissing the well-established and unprecedentedly
cozy economic ties between the Bush dynasty, Big Oil, the Saudi royals
and the Bin Laden clan? These "conspiracies" have been confirmed
beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Surely Cohen can't be arguing that it be forbidden to investigate,
with hindsight, whether these relationships might have resulted in an
administration-wide blind-spot with devastating results?

Surely Cohen has heard of John O'Neill? Surely he's read Kevin
Phillips's damning and authoritative Bush family chronicle, American
Dynasty?

>>The success of Moore's movie, though, suggests
>>this is happening -- a dialogue in which anti-Bush
>>forces talk to themselves and do so in a way that
>>puts off others.

Yes, because stealing moves from the conservative playbook would
surely result in an electoral disaster of epic proportions. Just look
how low the Republicans have sunk by talking to themselves in a way
that puts off others! Conservatives must be stupid to spend so much
time and effort rallying their base with dynamic appeals to the heart,
soul and guts. All their divisive rhetoric has managed to give them is
control of the Congress, the Senate, the Supreme Court and the White
House. We wouldn't want the people Cohen ominously labels "the
anti-Bush forces" to emulate this kind of unmitigated failure.

>>I found that happening to me in the run-up to the war,
>>when I spent more time and energy arguing with those
>>who said the war was about oil (no!) or Israel (no!) or
>>something just as silly than I did questioning the stated
>>reasons for invading Iraq -- weapons of mass destruction
>>and Hussein's links to Osama bin Laden. This was stupid
>>of me, but human nature nonetheless.

At long last, Cohen boils his own argument down to its fetid essence,
the literary equivalent of a frustrated two-year-old's foot-stomping
tantrum.

Apparently, only crazed fanatics could be upset by the obscene crush
of war pigs lining up to jam their snouts into the no-bid contract
trough, brimming with greenback salad smothered in a sweet crude
balsamic.

Only Hitler-worshiping lunatics would dare to suggest that the
neoconservatives who provided the intellectually and morally bankrupt
rationalizations for Bush's war have anything but a perfectly fair and
even-handed grasp of the Middle East situation.

And the less said about the sinister and psychopathic Armageddonism in
which Preznit Dubya and many of his partisans indulge, the better.

>>Some of that old feeling returned while watching
>>Moore's assault on the documentary form. It is so
>>juvenile in its approach, so awful in its journalism,
>>such an inside joke for people who already hate
>>Bush, that I found myself feeling a bit sorry for a
>>president who is depicted mostly as a befuddled
>>dope. I fear how it will play to the undecided.

Cohen's fear is plain to see. It verges on the kind of wild-eyed,
hysterical paranoia he falsely accuses Moore of inciting with his
film. It's as though Cohen is afraid that if liberals and moderates
were to become as forceful in defense of their beliefs as
conservatives are, it would result in a Civil War and thus, perhaps, a
decline in his standard of living.

>>For them, I recommend Spider-Man 2.

For the Washington Post's Richard Cohen, I recommend a swift, hard
kick in the ass.



On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 5:13 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> As a courageous investigative journalist, do you think Greenwald's now
> become a mouthpiece for Putin merely because Russia cagily gave his past
> source Snowden asylum? Is that really all it takes to buy his collusion? Or
> is there some other reason for his alleged bias that you're speaking of.
> Which statements of his on the clip do you specifically disagree with?
>
> LK
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Morris
> Sent: Jan 9, 2017 5:07 PM
> To: "kelber at mindspring.com"
> Cc: P-list
> Subject: Re: NP - Did Putin Swing the Election to Trump? Of Course He Did.
>
> Nice try to paint your stance as beleaguered minority one. But the point is
> that Greenwald is not unbiased when it comes to Russia.
>
> David Morris
>
> On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 4:04 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>
>> Is there any way to dissent from orthodoxy without being called a lunatic,
>> a dupe or an axe-grinder?
>>
>> Laura
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: David Morris
>> Sent: Jan 9, 2017 5:00 PM
>> To: "kelber at mindspring.com"
>> Cc: P-list
>> Subject: Re: NP - Did Putin Swing the Election to Trump? Of Course He Did.
>>
>> Greenwald is NOT a reliable source in this case.  His axe grinding is as
>> obvious as hell.
>>
>> David Morris
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 3:55 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> As a Pynchon reader, I can simultaneously hold two ideas in my brain, one
>>> of which is supported and one of which is not supported by the liberal
>>> establishment: 1. Trump is a horror; and 2. Putin wasn't responsible for his
>>> election.
>>>
>>> http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/08/us/greenwald-intel-report-reliable-cnntv/
>>>
>>> Laura
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: David Morris
>>> Sent: Jan 9, 2017 4:35 PM
>>> To: P-list
>>> Subject: NP - Did Putin Swing the Election to Trump? Of Course He Did.
>>>
>>> Thomas Eckhardt was oh so concerned about the Ukraine.  Not that it was
>>> being annexed by Russia, but that some of those wanting freedom from Russia
>>> were nazis.  Now the US is being annexed by nazis with the help of Russia.
>>> Where is his concern now?
>>>
>>> David Morris
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/01/did-putin-swing-election-trump-course-he-did
>>>
>>> Given how close the election was, there's a pretty good chance that
>>> Putin's campaign of cyber-chaos had enough oomph to swing things all by
>>> itself.
>>>
>>> I'm a little surprised this hasn't produced more panic. In the United
>>> States I understand why it hasn't: Democrats don't want to sound like sore
>>> losers and Republicans don't care as long as their guy won. But what about
>>> the rest of the world?
>>
>>
>
> - Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l