Flashback to 1998:
On January 27, 1998, Hillary Clinton appeared on NBC's The Today Show, in an interview with Matt Lauer.
Matt Lauer: "You have said, I understand, to some close friends, that this is the last great battle, and that one side or the other is going down here."
Hillary Clinton: "Well, I don't know if I've been that dramatic. That would sound like a good line from a movie. But I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this — they have popped up in other settings. This is — the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president."
In the years since 1998, every time the Clinton's were questions or allegations against one or both of them came to light, it was always blamed on the vast right wing conspiracy.... never their own actions.
Fast forward to this years conventions, caucuses and primaries, we first saw Mike Huckabee defy the popular polls and walk away with the GOP win in Iowa, despite predictions, despite the fact that Mitt Romney spent 10 million dollars in Iowa and despite conventional wisdom and I saw many reasons being speculated on, from the evangelical vote, to change or women liked him and even that Iowa did not like Romney's attack ads, but not once did I see (yes I could have missed some comment somewhere, so feel free to point out a URL if you did see it) accusations of fraud, voter tampering or outright cries of conspiracy and DIEBOLD!!!!!!
Then we get to New Hampshire, all polls once again point to one person, on the Democratic side, Obama, and Clinton takes the primary by a narrow margin and out comes the far left again with "its a conspiracy"!!!! Cries of DIEBOLD!!!! Rigged election!!!!
Whether it is in any bloggers post or in the comment sections, we see cries of conspiracy, just like most of the supporters of Ron Paul, but as we have discussed here a time or three, they are a species all of their own, but the recent cries over the Clinton win, are from the far left.
This was noticed by the Dallas Morning news.
AUSTIN – The results weren't even in when the blogosphere started to hum with a theory that sharply divided Democrats online: Barack Obama lost to Hillary Rodham Clinton in New Hampshire because the vote was rigged.
"Something stinks in New Hampshire," a commenter posted on the popular liberal site Americablog.com.
Curious about the "wildly inaccurate" polls that put Mr. Obama in a double-digit lead going into Tuesday's primary, blogger Brad Friedman, a Los Angeles-based election-fraud watchdog, questioned the results as soon as they arrived, and all day Wednesday.
"Other folks that I've spoken to, who follow this sort of thing, share my concern at this hour," he wrote on bradblog.com. "If I was Barack Obama, I'd certainly not have conceded this election this quickly. I'm not quite sure what he was thinking."
An Obama representative said the campaign is not alleging that fraud occurred. Clinton aides did not return calls seeking comment.
But the buzz grew all day Wednesday as bloggers across the nation keyed into the fact that 81 percent of New Hampshire votes were being counted on machines that an HBO documentary alleged are easily hacked. It also didn't hurt that New Hampshire was the site of a recount after allegations of fraud in 2004, spotlighted in the much-praised documentary.
Now before I go any farther, I recently did a piece about DIEBOLD myself, from a 10 page New York Times Magazine piece and the majority of problems with the system was printer malfunctions, powering down, human error and variety of other kinks, but very little of the problems with the machines came from "rigging", if any.
Go read it yourself so you can see how silly the examples I am going to show you really are.
Now lets start with The Brad Blog, which the accusations are actually in the post and not just from the comments section.
Even the Exit Polls showed that Obama should have won, according to Chris Matthews on Hardball today. It's the first specific indication that we've seen that the raw, unadjusted Exit Poll data, which only corporate mainstream media folks, not mere mortals, are allowed to see, confirmed all of the pre-election polling which predicted an Obama win.
[...]
"Why were the polls taken, of people coming out of the booth, so off?," Matthews tries to ask his guests again and again. And again.
All of them twisted and turned and contorted and grappled and speculated, coming up with every possible unverifiable, backwards-engineered explanation, save for the one that must not be named. The 600 lb. canary in the virtual living room...the fact that no human being has bothered to check what was actually on NH's vast majority of ballots (80%) which were "counted" by error-prone, hackable Diebold optical-scan machines, all controlled by one bad, horribly irresponsible private company, who has no business being anywhere near a public election.
We've yet to see that raw Exit data ourselves, as mentioned. But we're working on it. Even while we're still working on getting the never-released raw data from 2004, when the Exit Polls were done then, as now, by Mitofsky/Edison.
That is just from the most recent post.
Others include, just from the headlines "1/8/08 - 'Problems' with Paper Ballots in State Inaccurately Reported by National Mainstream Media", "1/8/08 - Pre-Election Polls Wildly Different Than Results Announced for Clinton/Obama", "1/9/08 - Tribune Media: MSM Failed to Note 'Hackable Diebold Red Flags' in NH Primary Results", "1/9/08 - New Docs: Exec at NH's Diebold Vote Counting Firm Convicted of Narcotics Trafficking", "1/9/08 - 7 Point Swing for Clinton Over Obama in NH's Diebold Precincts, and "1/9/08 - Chris Matthews: Raw EXIT POLL Data 'Indicated Significant Victory' for Obama in NH"...... just to name a few of the posts themselves.
The Gun Toting Liberal:
To subscribe to this line of reasoning, one must FIRST accept the far-fetched notion that Senator Queen Clinton could ever do anything deceptive and live peacefully in her own skin. While, once past that fact, we are left only with a small handful of “radical conspiracy theorists”, the Queen’s campaign didn’t do themselves much of a favor when they failed to refute the allegations…
Looking around, I found more conspiracy theories that were not mentioned in the Dallas Morning News.
MediaTakeout.com:
"Conspiracy?? New Reports Suggest That Hillary May Have Actually Lost The New Hampshire Primary"
January 10, 2008. MediaTakeOut.com is hearing some disturbing chatter going around that Hillary Clinton may have rigged the New Hampshire primary vote. According to growing reports on both Democratic and Republican blogs, Hillary's surprising victory may have been caused by voter fraud.
Of course the mainstream media isn't trying to touch this story with a 10 foot pole. But we're not the mainstream media. And besides, while we're not quite sure we believe it, this is the kind of story that needs to be put out there.
Then that site links to Presscue, which has graphs to back up the accusations that mediatakeout have just thrown about, while offering the disclaimer that they are just "putting it out there".
The comment sections of other blogs and forums have gotten so out of hand with this "conspiracy" and "fraud" accusations, that Democratic Underground administrators have had to crack down:
After careful consideration, the DU Administrators have come to the conclusion that this discussion has become disruptive and divisive to our community. If there were any credible evidence to support the allegation of fraud or voting machine malfunction in New Hampshire, then I would be more than willing to let the discussion continue in our two General Discussion forums. But at this point no such evidence has been produced. The horse has been beaten to death, propped back up, then beaten to death again. Everyone has said their piece (numerous times). Nothing new is being added, and no minds are being changed. After all that, here's where we stand:
1. No credible evidence of fraud or malfunction has yet been produced.
2. A number of observers here and elsewhere have provided perfectly rational explanations for alleged discrepancies between tracking polls and the final outcome.
3. So far there has been nary a peep from any campaign indicating that they believe there may have been either fraud or machine malfunction in New Hampshire.
4. If any of the campaigns had reason to believe that there was fraud or machine malfunction in New Hampshire, and if they wished to challenge the results of the election, a paper trail exists whereby the results could be verified.
If someone actually has some real evidence to support the claims of fraud or machine malfunction, then we'll be glad to let this discussion back into the General Discussion forums. But unless that happens, I think the time has come to take a break.
From now on:
Please do not post any more threads alleging fraud or machine malfunction in New Hampshire in either the General Discussion forum or the General Discussion: Politics forum. If you wish to discuss alleged election fraud or machine malfunction in New Hampshire, please do so in our Election Reform forum.
I am instructing the moderators to move all threads on the topic of election fraud or machine malfunction in New Hampshire out of the two General Discussion forums and into the Election Reform forum.
Thank you for your understanding.
Skinner
DU Admin
Here and here are just two of those threads and the insanity is running rampant.
The search engines show that there are many more sites floating the "conspiracy"angle.
The fact is that the far left has grown so accustomed to wildly throwing conspiracy theories around that they see one at every turn, around every corner and in every situation and they need no stinkin proof, the fact that THEIR candidate did not win is simply beyond the realm of possibility in THEIR minds.
I truly thought that most conspiracy theorists had attached themselves to Ron Paul but I see that isn't true, the far left has their own separate species of people that cannot handle the basic fact that the polls were wrong, they sample a group and sometimes it is representative of the whole and other times it is not.
It IS that simple.
What truly amuses me to no end though today (ok so I am easily amused) is the fact that in 1998, Hillary Clinton dubbed any opposition as some "vast right wing conspiracy" and today, we see she is being accused of some left wing conspiracy, not by the right, not against the right but from the left and against the left.
The word Karma comes to mind as does the expression, Poetic Justice.
Never fear though, there are still those out there that think it IS a "vast right wing conspiracy" that is handing Clinton unearned wins.
NewsHoggers:
I've seen some mockery from the wingers that now the Dems are accusing their own of fraud, but that's not really the case. The machines are under the control of companies that are GOP friendly and the outcome of both races is material to their long term strategy. The GOP wants to keep Hillary as their convenient demon. They could have a lot of reasons to skew the results in her favor.
Anyone else hearing twilight zone music in their heads right about now?
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