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Post by Slam_Bradley on Oct 20, 2016 23:56:38 GMT -5
There's also a huge difference between a statutory automatic recount in which a statewide vote is decided by less and 600 votes out of 5.4 million votes and claiming that a Presidential election is "rigged" when you're losing in the polls before a single vote has been cast.
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Oct 21, 2016 0:33:15 GMT -5
Agreed that Trump has acted as a whiny excuse-in-the-making candidate for weeks on end about the media being against him and the election being rigged. Very pathetic. And as I mentioned, if asked that question about supporting the winner if it wasn't him, a polished politician would have handled it much more intelligently
Now, if the Gore comparison doesn't apply, that's fine. But in close elections, a recount is part of the system. And there's been a lot of rhetoric being spoken that to not keep that option open, to categorically state you wouldn't ask for a recount, is an unpatriotic act. And that is where I see hypocrisy since it has been done in-numerous times by both parties
But again, I think the point will be totally moot. And if it's the landslide I foresee and Trump plays the A-Hole card, then its further evidence he is one
Funny, the other presidential happenstance as that occurred in the JFK-Nixon election which was extremely close and there was much evidence that Mayor Daley of Chicago rigged voting for the Democrats to tilt Illinois on JFK's behalf. Nixon's advisers strongly suggested he challenge the results but Nixon declined so as not to mire the country in political turmoil. Nixon being magnanimous? Will wonders never cease?
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 21, 2016 0:34:09 GMT -5
And Gore never said that an SNL skit making fun of him was the same as the media rigging the election.
So yet another detail in which the two cases vary wildly.
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 21, 2016 0:47:30 GMT -5
Agreed that Trump has acted as a whiny excuse-in-the-making candidate for weeks on end about the media being against him and the election being rigged. Very pathetic. And as I mentioned, if asked that question about supporting the winner if it wasn't him, a polished politician would have handled it much more intelligently Now, if the Gore comparison doesn't apply, that's fine. But in close elections, a recount is part of the system. And there's been a lot of rhetoric being spoken that to not keep that option open, to categorically state you wouldn't ask for a recount, is an unpatriotic act. And that is where I see hypocrisy since it has been done in-numerous times by both parties But again, I think the point will be totally moot. And if it's the landslide I foresee and Trump plays the A-Hole card, then its further evidence he is one Funny, the other presidential happenstance as that occurred in the JFK-Nixon election which was extremely close and there was much evidence that Mayor Daley of Chicago rigged voting for the Democrats to tilt Illinois on JFK's behalf. Nixon's advisers strongly suggested he challenge the results but Nixon declined so as not to mire the country in political turmoil. Nixon being magnanimous? Will wonders never cease? The reason that Nixon didn't challenge the election in 1960 was that he knew that the Dems were aware of GOP efforts to stuff the ballots in a lot of places as well. I forget the details. I think I read it in Theodore White's The Making of the President 1960, but it's been a while. The thing about Mayor Dailey gets repeated A LOT! I think because of sour grapes that Nixon lost. But think about it. How naïve do you have to be to think that that mean Mayor Daily was stuffing the ballot boxes while those nice Nixon people were making sure everybody on the GOP team was playing strictly by the rules?
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Oct 21, 2016 1:04:17 GMT -5
Again, I really don't think that anyone has said it's unpatriotic or bad for the system to allow a recount to go forward if there is a vote that is that close. If someone has, please point it out to me. Because they shouldn't.
Honestly, it would never have been an issue if Trump didn't continually act like a petulant toddler and piss and moan that the election is rigged and is going to be stolen from him, based on nothing but his hubris and his inability to think that he could possibly lose.
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Oct 21, 2016 1:04:38 GMT -5
Agreed that Trump has acted as a whiny excuse-in-the-making candidate for weeks on end about the media being against him and the election being rigged. Very pathetic. And as I mentioned, if asked that question about supporting the winner if it wasn't him, a polished politician would have handled it much more intelligently Now, if the Gore comparison doesn't apply, that's fine. But in close elections, a recount is part of the system. And there's been a lot of rhetoric being spoken that to not keep that option open, to categorically state you wouldn't ask for a recount, is an unpatriotic act. And that is where I see hypocrisy since it has been done in-numerous times by both parties But again, I think the point will be totally moot. And if it's the landslide I foresee and Trump plays the A-Hole card, then its further evidence he is one Funny, the other presidential happenstance as that occurred in the JFK-Nixon election which was extremely close and there was much evidence that Mayor Daley of Chicago rigged voting for the Democrats to tilt Illinois on JFK's behalf. Nixon's advisers strongly suggested he challenge the results but Nixon declined so as not to mire the country in political turmoil. Nixon being magnanimous? Will wonders never cease? The reason that Nixon didn't challenge the election in 1960 was that he knew that the Dems were aware of GOP efforts to stuff the ballots in a lot of places as well. I forget the details. I think I read it in Theodore White's The Making of the President 1960, but it's been a while. The thing about Mayor Dailey gets repeated A LOT! I think because of sour grapes that Nixon lost. But think about it. How naïve do you have to be to think that that mean Mayor Daily was stuffing the ballot boxes while those nice Nixon people were making sure everybody on the GOP team was playing strictly by the rules? I hope you're not saying that, in this example, Republicans had to be playing dirtier than the Democrats because their Republicans. That's being quite partisan and even a bit naive. And yes, Mayor Daley was a meanie, just ask the demonstrators at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968.
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Post by Spike-X on Oct 21, 2016 2:19:56 GMT -5
Actually Ish, Florida law requires the recount that took place. Al Gore called George W. Bush and conceded, but once he was told that the recount was going to occur in order to be compliant with Florida law, he was put in the awkward position where he had to call back Bush and rescind his concession until the entire process was complete. Thank you for the correction/clarification.
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Post by the4thpip on Oct 21, 2016 2:49:59 GMT -5
Katherine Harris would have been great on a Trump cabinet.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 21, 2016 8:31:19 GMT -5
The reason that Nixon didn't challenge the election in 1960 was that he knew that the Dems were aware of GOP efforts to stuff the ballots in a lot of places as well. I forget the details. I think I read it in Theodore White's The Making of the President 1960, but it's been a while. The thing about Mayor Dailey gets repeated A LOT! I think because of sour grapes that Nixon lost. But think about it. How naïve do you have to be to think that that mean Mayor Daily was stuffing the ballot boxes while those nice Nixon people were making sure everybody on the GOP team was playing strictly by the rules? Can't remember who the quote was attributed to, but twice in the last week or so I've read that some GOP higher-up, when asked why the party didn't contest the Illinois results, replied, "Because we stole Kentucky."
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 21, 2016 10:55:00 GMT -5
I hope you're not saying that, in this example, Republicans had to be playing dirtier than the Democrats because their Republicans. That's being quite partisan and even a bit naive. And yes, Mayor Daley was a meanie, just ask the demonstrators at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968. Well, I don't think I'd go so far as to say that Mayor Daley didn't stuff the ballot boxes. He certainly had the reputation for rough and unsavory politics (and the 1968 "police riot," as Dan Rather called it, certainly supports Daley's awful reputation in this respect) and Chicago has a reputation for being that kind of town. But this is Nixon studies. And one thing you find out when you study Nixon as much as I have, is that a lot of things get repeated and repeated that have very little basis in fact if you dig a little deeper. (And yes, it's sort of true for many subjects in history. Just start digging around in Reagan scholarship. But Nixon seems (to me anyway) to have a particularly large body of myth around him.) I have never dug around and tried to confirm or debunk the stories about all the Chicago dead who voted for Kennedy as a result of Daley's machinations. So maybe there's some really good evidence for the allegations. It's been a while since I was reading every book on Nixon and Watergate that I could find. It's only fairly recently that I even wondered about whether Daily was that corrupt. It's something that people say all the time, probably with good reason. Believe me, I wouldn't be surprised if I looked into it and discovered that the allegations (and much worse) were well-documented. A little background on why I've read so much about Nixon. I was ten when he resigned (1974) and I was already following politics. I remember the election of 1972 very well. How excited we were that Nixon won! (Had I been able to vote, I would have voted Republican in 1972 and 1976. I'm not so sure about 1980. I couldn't stand Carter, but I couldn't see why everybody thought Reagan was so great. (I would have probably voted for Anderson.) Republican adoration for a mediocrity like Reagan was what set me on the road to examining politics a lot more closely and eventually becoming a liberal and a Democrat.) As a kid, I was really confused by Watergate. At one point I thought Nixon had killed somebody. Little by little, I read what I could find in the newspapers, and I eventually started reading a lot of books on Nixon and Watergate. I read two of Nixon's books - Six Crises and the Memoirs - and several biographies, and quite a few books on Watergate, stuff like The Wars of Watergate, Witness to Power and - my favorite - Silent Coup. And one thing I found was that a lot of the "historical memory" around Nixon is kind of dodgy. I don't want to go on and on, so I'm just going to focus on a couple of things that are a little fresher in my memory. (It's been quite a while since I read any of these books. I don't think I've read more than one or two Nixon-related books since about 2000.) Let's talk a little bit about Alger Hiss. I read three books about the Hiss case in the 1990s. And then I put it aside and went on to other things. Then the decoded Venona transcripts were published. And I started hearing "the Venona transcripts prove that Alger Hiss was guilty" a lot. Nixon was vindicated in his persecution of Hiss! But was it true? I noticed it in a few newspaper columns by conservatives, a blunt statement - "the Venona transcripts prove Hiss was guilty!" - but with no other details. Just attacks on liberals for being wrong about Nixon - neener neener neener! I was curious about the Venona transcripts, but I didn't pursue it for a while. But when I was in the history program at Cal State Northridge, I was talking to one of the professors (he had written his doctorate on the Kefauver hearings on juvenile delinquency and he was telling me about the near-mint condition horror comics he had found among the official papers for the Kefauver committee) and Hiss came up, and he bluntly stated "Oh, the Venona transcripts proved Alger Hiss was guilty." And then I asked him what was in the transcripts that proved Hiss was guilty, and I got a weird blank stare. He was a very bright guy, very funny, relatively young for a professor, and he always kept his politics close to his chest. So I don't know if he was repeating the mantra because he was a conservative or if he had just heard it so often that it just sounded right. The CSUN library had the book about Venona! It had every transcript decoded and translated from Russian to English. And the idea that it proves Hiss was guilty is based on a number of speculations. The Soviet operatives are not directly named. They have code names. There is a code name "Ales" which is said to be Alger Hiss. I can't remember if the evidence that Ales is Alger Hiss is particularly strong. But the way the message is worded - something like "our source close to Ales" - doesn't say Ales was a Communist spy. As a matter of fact, the way the thing is worded, Ales almost certainly isn't a spy! Alger Hiss may have been a Communist spy. But the Venona transcripts certainly don't prove any such thing. But saying that they do vindicates Nixon's role in the Communist witch hunts of the 1950s. This is getting really long, so I'll just do one more. This is something I've wondered about for a very long time. But I could never find anything confirming it or debunking it. Just this very morning, I thought about it while I was working out my response about Mayor Daley and I came across a online article about it! This is about the Nixon-Kennedy debate, the famous one where Nixon was kind of sick and nervous and Kennedy was groomed and prepared and oozing vitality. So Kennedy impressed the TV viewers. But the people listening on the radio thought Nixon had won based on substance. Or did they? I eventually started wondering about this little talking point. It's become an article of faith for the campaign of 1960. I started looking around for some kind of attribution about where this belief came from, some details to help me figure out if it was credible. And I couldn't find anything. (The article I'm going to link says that Theodore White (in his book The Making of the President 1960) says that TV audiences said that Kennedy won while radio audiences said it was a tie, but White doesn't give any source. I read White's book a long time ago, but because White's version differs from what Nixon says in one of his books, this might be why I started wondering about it.) I've looked for something about this topic quite a few times, but I could never find anything concrete. But today, I found this: Did JFK really win a debate because he looked better on television?I love it when I come across something like this! The exact kinds of details I have been looking for! And to make it even better, it turns out I had good reason to be skeptical! In the big picture, it's a small thing. But it illustrates why I'm skeptical. Things don't become true just because they've been said over and over again with an authoritative tone. So, yeah, there's a pretty good chance that there's some truth to the stories about thousands, maybe tens of thousands of dead Chicagoans voting for Kennedy. But there's no doubt that it's become a talking point and I'd sure like to know more about it, just as I'd like to know more about the GOP allegedly stealing Kentucky in the same election.
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Post by Prince Hal on Oct 21, 2016 12:48:40 GMT -5
The reason that Nixon didn't challenge the election in 1960 was that he knew that the Dems were aware of GOP efforts to stuff the ballots in a lot of places as well. I forget the details. I think I read it in Theodore White's The Making of the President 1960, but it's been a while. The thing about Mayor Dailey gets repeated A LOT! I think because of sour grapes that Nixon lost. But think about it. How naïve do you have to be to think that that mean Mayor Daily was stuffing the ballot boxes while those nice Nixon people were making sure everybody on the GOP team was playing strictly by the rules? Can't remember who the quote was attributed to, but twice in the last week or so I've read that some GOP higher-up, when asked why the party didn't contest the Illinois results, replied, "Because we stole Kentucky." It was Joe McCarthy cosplay enthusiast Patrick Buchanan who said that.
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Oct 21, 2016 13:59:53 GMT -5
I got about 8 years on Hoosier and so I remember the Kennedy assassination as a 9 year old which opened my eyes to real-world happenings in a particularly brutal way. As a full fledged hippie, I also worked for the McGovern candidacy in 1972, stuffing envelopes at their headquarters for the most part. So disappointed when he lost and when Watergate broke, I followed the news everyday like a hawk, watching the Senate Committee meetings as much as I can and was the happiest long-hair freak imaginable when he resigned
Regarding the 1960 election, both parties doing some cheating goes without saying. The Cook County rising-from-the-dead to vote for Kennedy and other things, has been documented and referred to so often that you might think it was an urban myth but then you would have to think the My Lai massacre was too by the same token. I'm quite convinced it happened. Liberal investigators are as well. And Illinois was probably not the only state.But conversely, Nixon's campaign very likely did their own skulduggery. The comparison however, seems to have favored Kennedy since Cook County tilted Illinois to the Dems and held more electoral college votes than something like Kentucky
Anyway, the simple observation I was making was Nixon had grounds to contest the 1960 vote, the results were that close. Even if the Dems can counter with their own challenger, Nixon could have done it to see where the chips would finally fall. But he didn't, saving us getting into a quagmire of back and forth accusations. So you need to give a person credit for something once in a while and I'll give him credit for that
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 21, 2016 14:12:02 GMT -5
The GOP provided cover so Nixon wouldn't look like a sore loser. But the rest of the GOP contested plenty of the results. It kind of makes you sick to your stomach when you think of scorn aimed at the Democrats for daring to question the results in Florida in 2000. Was Nixon Robbed?
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Post by wildfire2099 on Oct 21, 2016 14:13:24 GMT -5
And Gore never said that an SNL skit making fun of him was the same as the media rigging the election. So yet another detail in which the two cases vary wildly. In fact, for all that I think Gore is a complete buffoon, he is a good natured one... he got hit pretty hard by both South Park and Colbert (though the Colbert was recent, it was still awesome).. gotta give him props for that. It is funny how Trump loved the media during the primaries when no other candidate could get any coverage because they were so focused on him, and now they suddenly hate him. I mean sure, MS NBC is WAY to the left, and the networks and CNN are a little to the left, but Fox is just as far to the right to balance things... it's not like we don't have 300 years or so of a tradition of biased media reporting in this country. Besides, CNN tries.. I mean, they have Jeffrey Lord on all the time, and the blonde woman that worships the ground Trump walks one whose name escapes me at the moment. It's not balanced, certainly, but they at least have an opposing view point... even if my man Van Jones makes them both look silly every time they are on the same set.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Oct 21, 2016 14:17:35 GMT -5
This doesn't really relate that much, but about 5 years ago (just before his death) I met George McGovern, he was a speaker at a conference I was selling books at. He was the one of the nicest famous people I've met... when I e-mailed him to ask which if his books to sell, he personally called to tell me, and we had a nice conversation while waiting for people to come up and buy his book at the event. I'm much too young to have been around for his political career, but it made me feel bad he never was the president.
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