Sunday, November 7, 2004

Karl Rove, Evil Genius? On Fox News, the evil genius started talking about the Republican party dominating politics for the next several decades.  Okay, make that "Karl Rove, Evil Crack-Smoking Genius."  Look, here's what happened.  Bush won by about 4 million votes.  He won a 51-49 election.  There are about 217 million people of voting age in this country.  Take out the people who are convicted felons and can't vote.  Let's be really generous and take out 10% - I think that's high, but let's do it.  That leaves 195 million people.  If you get 58 million votes, that's not a mandate.  That's not even close to a majority.  That's 29.7%.  So fuck you and your mandate. Oh, you think that's not fair?  Let's count registered voters.  The Census Bureau estimated there were 130 million registered voters, and estimated about 8.6 million new voters were added after that.  So out of about 138 million voters, Bushie got 58 million votes.  That's still only 42%, and still less than a majority.  Forget about a landslide, a mandate, or any other of the ridiculous terms flying about on the talk shows.  If Bush can't even get enough people off the couch to give him a majority, how can he claim a mandate now? By the way, what was the center of Rove's argument?  William McKinley.  He drew comparisons to the memorable victory of McKinley in 1986, a victory that he says changed politics for years afterward.  First, someone forgot to tell him that McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist early in his second term.  Probably not good to compare your boy to someone who got shot dead. And second, WTF?!  Who remembers William McKinley's reign of terror, anyway?  I can see a comparison to Reagan, maybe, except Reagan really did win by a significant margin.  Bush won in a squeaker.  (That's a technical term.)  But McKinley? Someone also forgot to tell Rove that the major thing that marked his presidency was the Spanish-American War, a war largely considered to have been engineered by William Randolph Hearst in order to sell newspapers.  "You furnish the photographs, I'll furnish the war," Mr. Hearst famously quipped.  Never good to compare your "war president" boy to the one who ran a war on trumped-up reasons.  3:01:11 PM     comment []