In which Orson Scott Card demonstrates tunnel vision

[unixronin]

From an article in the Greensboro, NC Rhinoceros Times:

One Party Rule Forever!

Because the mainstream press refuses to see anything wrong in the Obama administration, even the most outrageous actions are given astonishingly gentle treatment -- if they get any treatment at all.

So of course we hear almost nothing about the coup d'etat that is under way in the White House.

OK, you can probably tell the general drift of the article from those first couple of paragraphs.  Card's basic point is that the Obama administration plans to steal the next election, and all subsequent ones, by gerrymandering based upon falsified census numbers that use padded "estimated" numnbers for the poor, the homeless and illegal immigrants.  (I'm not quite sure how he thinks padding the numbers of illegal immigrants is relevant to election theft via gerrymandering, since they can't vote anyway.)

But the point that caught my eye here is about two thirds of the way down the article:

Remember how, when the Patriot Act was passed, we were flooded with outraged stories in the press about how Americans' rights were going to be trampled on?

None of it came true.

... Uh, wait a minute here.  Run that last bit by me again?  None of it came true?

Funny, I thought Card lived in the same US that I do.  Show of hands, please, if YOU think nobody's rights got trampled on as a result of, or in manners enabled by, the USA-PATRIOT Act.

(That said, I am in basic agreement with Card's point that basing the census on "estimates" is a pretty questionable practice.  I don't happen to agree with him that it's part of a coup d'état though.)

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Actually, Card looked at it from the opposing point of view — that the Supreme Court blocked the Gore campaign from "stealing" the election by the various shenanigans in the recounts. For instance, the inch-thick manual distributed by the legal team gave detailed instructions for using every possible legal technicality to throw out ballots that were expected to be Republican votes, such as military absentee ballots on which someone had failed to dot an I or cross a T, while keeping absentee ballots from Israel which were expected to be Democratic votes.

The truth of the matter is, our elections are dirty, and when any election is as close as Florida 2000 was, both sides pull every dirty trick they can get away with to try to swing it their way, both sides accuse the other of trying to steal it, and both are probably correct to about the same extent.