Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)

by Mark Crispin Miller

Book Overview

In Fooled Again , renowned media critic Mark Crispin Miller argues that it wasn't "moral values" that swung the 2004 presidential race-it was theft. A huge array of anomalies, improper practices, and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465045790
• ISBN13: 9780465045792
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
• Length: 364 Pages
• Weight: 1.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.9" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A insightful call to action

Mark Crispin Miller has made it his work to provide Americans with the information they need to see the actions of the NeoCons not as isolated events but as a pattern of interlocking points that have moved the conversion of American government far along the path to fascism. His courage in confronting not only the opposition but the leadership of the Democratic Party has provided a rallying point. When your leaders fail to be the voice for protest then the people must find new leaders. Black Box, and the other many efforts to bring the electoral process back to the people owe much to his efforts and to his voice. This book provides the reader with the solid information needed to understand what has happened and then see where individudal efforts are best applied. It is a must read for anyone who is committed to freedom. As a Republican I urge all Republicans and Libertarians ro read it and buy it to give to others.

A Hard Rain Is Falling

There are scores of new and recent books worth reading, but how often does a book invite comparison with SILENT SPRING, UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED or, for that matter, THE PENTAGON PAPERS. Laugh if you will, but you'll be laughing all the way to the vault, your own burial place as the citizen of a Democracy. Once you begin reading this book, you won't be able to stop until you finish it. Despite the lack of national media coverage of massive election-related fraud Mark Crispin Miller connects the dots (or should I say pixels) and shows how the presidential election of 2004 was stolen in plain sight. On June 19th of 2005 Miller interviewed Denise Shull, a New Yorker who had grown up in Ohio, and returned to help the Kerry campaign during its final week. While serving as a poll checker on election day, she discovered, to her disbelief and horror, that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the Democratic voters in the four precincts she monitored were not on the master list of registered voters. Many of them had lived and voted in the same area for years. People were being turned away from the polls and denied their right to vote. But Ohio isn't the only state where the GOP found ways to suppress voter turnout and the registration of Democrats. In Arizona (and other states) students were told they couldn't vote where they attended school. In Florida, eligible voters were purged from the rolls. In many states minority voters were intimidated and confused through the use of dirty tricks. Democratic registration forms were thrown away by contractors like Sproul and Associates who were paid millions of dollars by the RNC to operate in swing states before the election. Miller also shows how the electronic voting machines (the major companies being controlled by Republican interests) delivered votes for Bush despite the evidence of exit polls, and Bush's 2004 weakness within a divided Republican party. Furthermore, one must read this book to find out the role of the Pentagon in disenfranchising countless Americans abroad. When I was growing up in the 1960's there was a tongue-in-cheek television program called "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." starring Robert Vaughn as Napolean Solo. Solo once said, as he held a listening device, "sometimes the most obvious is the most devious." After reading FOOLED AGAIN, I thought of this. The author ends by pointing out that we, as citizens of this country must stand up and insist on electoral reform, meaning federal standards for elections and the banning of the electronic machines now in use.

A Devastating Indictment of the American Electoral System

Andrew Gumbel opens his book, STEAL THIS VOTE, with a stunning indictment of the American electoral process from ex-President Jimmy Carter. Asked if the Carter Center's "widely respected international election monitoring team" would ever considering monitoring an American election, Carter bluntly declined. "Not only would the voting system be regarded as a failure, he said, but the shortcomings were so egregious [they] would never agree to monitor an [American] election in the first place....'The American political system wouldn't measure up to any sort of international standards...'" In FOOLED AGAIN, Mark Crispin Miller analyzes the 2004 Presidential election and finds that President Carter was indeed correct in his assessment. Through his overview of the election results and his detailed analysis of the outcome in Florida and Ohio, he not only demonstrates how badly broken our national electoral system is, he provides more than enough evidence to suggest that our current President, George W. Bush, has in fact stolen two elections in the last five years. Why were reported election results so substantially at odds with the same day's exit polling (a first in American history)? Why were reported election results so substantially at odds with early voter returns in so many States, also a result without precedent? Why did Kerry's performance in key Democratic districts actually decline from Gore's, despite thousands of Democratic voter registrations and the relative absence of Ralph Nader from 2004's race? And what are we to make of Republican Congressman Peter King's assertion in the summer of 2003 that the 2004 election was already over? How did he know Bush would win? "It's all over but the counting," he answered. "And we'll take care of the counting." And so they did. The examples are detailed, numerous, and specific: widespread and systematic pre-election disenfranchisement by local Republican election officials, failure to register Democratic voters, distributing absentee ballots late or incorrectly, spreading false and misleading information, refusing to register Democrats to vote, manipulating the availability of working voting machines to favor Republican precincts, intimidating voters on college campuses and at the polls, undersupplying provisional ballots in Democratic districts, throwing away Democratic votes, manipulating paperless electronic voting machines manufactured by Republican supporters, and virtually prohibiting millions of overseas absentee ballots from being counted. Miller points out that the Republican Party not only engaged in all of these vote suppression tactics and more, they simultaneously asserted repeatedly that the Democratic Party was in fact the one that was engaging in the same underhanded behaviors they were perpetrating! Miller takes time out from his explication of events before and during the election to psychoanalyze the Republican Party's behavior. He contends that the more fanatical elements of the

Finally, the silence is broken

Since election night, I've had a feeling that all was not right with the voting. From studying this in the days afterwards, it soon became clear that something had gone very wrong. This book finally puts together all of the suspicious and downright criminal activity surrounding 2004's rigged election. The most glaring suspicion that the result was fraudulent arose around the massive discrepancies between the exit polls and the result in several states. Exit polls have been accurate at every election in living memory in the US - except in 2000, which we have since discovered would have been won by Al Gore if the Supreme Court had not stopped the count and handed `Dubya' the presidency. The exit polls in 2004 were dramatically at odds with the result, and every single discrepancy favoured Bush. In March 2005, a study came out from US Count Votes, computing that the odds against such an enormous error in the exit polls were 959,000 - 1. In other words, the chances that the 2004 election was not rigged are nearly a million to one. All of this may be news to you, because it has not been reported in the mainstream print media. CNN were even obliging enough to `adjust' their exit polls after the results were known to make them match up with the outcome, swiftly followed by the rest of what Miller ironically refers to as the "liberal media". Instead of reporting the facts, Miller asserts, the media referred to the matter flippantly, dismissing it as internet rumour and paranoid conspiracy theory, and continued to ignore the overwhelming evidence which began to emerge, particularly in Ohio, where the state senate investigated the matter. Mark Crispin Miller documents dozens of staggering assaults on democracy, from the coordinated disenfranchisement of overseas US voters (who favoured Kerry by a large margin), to the criminal suppression of the black vote. Miller points out that the CEOs of electronic voting companies are Republican fund-raisers and supporters and that vote manipulation would be remarkably easy, with many of the tallying computers online. Miller's concern is that the theological right will go to any lengths to win and retain power, since they see their political opponents - literally - as agents of Satan. He warns that this could happen again next time, and does not trust that the Democrats will stand against it, noting that although John Kerry's wife has publicly stated that she believes the vote was rigged, he has never defended his voters, then or since. The case Miller makes is compelling, and it is particularly disturbing to consider how well conditioned the public is: if it isn't reported in respectable media organs, it isn't news. America is slipping quietly into fascism, and this book is a welcome and essential wake-up call.

Thoughtcrime

I came to this book with, I think, the usual preconceptions: it will present a paranoid conspiracy theory, it 's just a Democrat's sour grapes, it will be the left-wing equivalent of an Ann Coulter or Joe Scarborough rant--in other words, nothing new to say, shrieked at top volume. Instead I found that Miller has the rare courage to take on a forbidden topic, one of the few remaining in America. He asks us to consider the possibility that our cherished democracy, the very heart of American exceptionalism and the thing that sets us apart from (and, in the eyes of many Americans, above) all other nations, is not merely flawed or compromised but actually in danger of disappearing. Perhaps it has already disappeared. We are now a nation in which one political party has no intention of ever releasing its hold on power and the other is too cowed to defend itself against constant attacks, let alone defend its constituents or the integrity of the process by which power is allocated. The "mature" and "reasonable" thing to do, of course, is to practice moderation, to avoid strong, polarizing accusations, to work with the opposition to provide strong governance, and always to understand that your political opponent is not your enemy. But this presupposes an opponent who is willing to practice moderation and reason in turn, rather than simply demand it. As President Bush and his allies keep reminding us about terrorism (with rather too intimate knowledge whereof they speak), fanatics cannot be reasoned with. Mark Crispin Milller has pointed out, in exquisitely documented detail, that this country has its own fanatical extremists to deal with, and they are not a fringe element. They are a significant force in the Republican Party, perhaps the dominant force. Miller shows in great detail what this means: the mindset that allows these people to justify their actions to themselves and the specific ways in which they have subverted American democracy. Under these circumstances, compromise and moderation can only fail. When we are faced with fanatics, true reason demands that we do what Miller has done: call them what they are. In short, this is a powerful and terrifying book. It is well documented and makes its case, if anything, too abundantly. The 2004 election was stolen. My nightmare is that generations from now, historians will look to Fooled Again as a valuable contemporary account of how America became a theological dictatorship.