The Shadow Knows

By: Chris Floyd

The U.S. media's long-delayed recount of the disputed Florida ballots from last year's presidential election is finally in, and the winner is - George!

George Orwell, that is.

Yes, the British author whose Zamyatin-inspired novel 1984 gave us the useful concept of "Newspeak" - that manipulative degradation of language now known as "spin" - was the man of the hour this week, as America's media elite put on a dazzling Orwellian display, spinning furiously to squeeze a "victory" for George W. Bush out of the mountain of evidence showing that Al Gore was the clear choice of the Florida electorate.

After weeks of fretful shilly-shallying - "Dare we disturb the Dear Leader whilst he dispenses the Lord's wrath upon the cave-dwelling infidels?" - a gaggle of media mandarins (The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN and assorted worthies) published their examination of more than 175,000 disputed ballots from Florida's election follies.

The results were interpreted separately by each organization using its own statisticians and analysts. Yet each came to the same basic conclusions: that Gore would have won a statewide recount of disputed ballots by any criteria; that the majority of Florida voters tried to vote for Gore, although thousands upon thousands had their ballots "spoiled" in various ways; and that a disproportionate number of "spoiled" ballots were found in African-American precincts, which voted for Gore by an overwhelming 9-1 margin.

Naturally, these were not the results trumpeted in the mandarins' various headlines. Here, the emphasis was on the fact that if a recount of one set of disputed ballots, the "undervotes" - those notorious hanging chads - from a limited number of counties had not been short-circuited by the U.S. Supreme Court, Bush might have barely held on to the small lead he had when his Florida campaign chairman Katherine Harris - who just happened to be the state official in charge of the election - certified his "victory".

Of course, this generous analysis overlooks - among other things - the hundreds of votes that Harris arbitrarily set aside when she made her decision. It also ignores the fact that 18 Florida counties never recounted their votes, despite a legal requirement to do so, leaving more than 1.5 million votes unexamined: an interesting tidbit reported by The Washington Post earlier this year - before the Dear Leader's wartime apotheosis.

But as Ronald Reagan once said - at the 1988 Republican convention that nominated the Dear Leader's dear old dad, as it happens - "Facts are stupid things". And U.S. mandarins certainly never let such "stupidities" deter them from their profitable mission to comfort the comfortable - and put everyone else to sleep.

Take, for instance, that good gray goose, The New York Times. Its lullaby begins with soothing assurances about the Supreme Court's role in assisting the creeping coup. (Or is it couping creeps?) Goosey doesn't want you to think that a clique of right-wing zealots could install a ruthless cabal in office against the wishes of the people. No, that didn't happen, children, because you see, if one of the restricted recount scenarios had been followed - and all those other nasty facts had gone poof! - Bush might have won anyway. So turn over now, and say night-night.

Far down in the text, however, the goose grudgingly (if obliquely) admits that if the Court had not also slapped an unconstitutional time limit on recounts, the Gore campaign or the Florida courts could have then pursued a number of options, including one suggested by the Supremes themselves: a recount of the entire state. That would be the same state-wide recount the mandarins all say that Gore would have won.

Still, even though it's now obvious beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Florida electorate intended to choose Al Gore over George Bush - just as the national electorate did, by a clear margin - we're sure the Dear Leader will be marvelously comforted by the soft, fluffy quilt of obfuscation the mandarins have so obligingly wrapped around him.

So turn over, Georgie, and say night-night.

Then kiss the Republic goodbye.

Of course, astute readers of the Global Eye know that the mandarins' recount - indeed, the entire post-election brouhaha of chads and courtrooms - was, in fact, a huge irrelevance. The fix was in before the first vote was cast, arranged by Brother Jeb, Chairman Katherine and some high-tech jiggery-pokery from a Republican-owned firm devoted to "electoral cleansing".

The scam was first uncovered by investigative reporter Greg Palast in his reports for the BBC and the Observer. We passed along word of his revelations in the Dec. 15, 2000 edition of the Global Eye. Here's how it worked. Florida hired a private company to "purge" its voter rolls of convicted felons ineligible to vote. (Most prisoners who've served their time regain their right to vote; in Jeb's highly Christian satrapy, they don't.)

Jeb and Kath gave the firm a set of deliberately vague specifications designed to produce "false positives": voters whose names and details were similar but not identical to ineligible felons. The firm later admitted that "at least 15 percent" of its list was incorrect - stripping between 7,000 to 10,000 legitimate voters from the rolls.

Some of the falsely accused managed to restore their voting rights; most didn't even learn of the problem until they showed up at the polls. As "race" was one of Jeb's leading criteria for bagging his "false positives", this consciously created muddle disenfranchised thousands of qualified black voters - the same group that went 9-1 for Gore against Jebbie's big brother.

Or should that be Big Brother? After all, we're now living in a Newspeak world: Defeat is Victory. Lies are Truth. Autocracy is Democracy.

And Bush is President.