Craig Unger has written a new book "Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove’s Secret Kingdom of Power" about the mastermind of George Bush’s two successful but crooked runs at the US Presidency.
Rove, as Unger explains, is at the center of two of the biggest scandals of the Bush administration. The Valerie Plame Wilson affair and the U.S. attorneys’ scandal. Rove was ALMOST indicted for the Plame affair but as we all know, the 13th commandment is not to get caught, and the 14th commandment is if you get caught not to get prosecuted. (Especially easy if you have gamed the judicial system with cronies who selectively prosecute only members of the other Party!)
Rove wasn’t gotten rid of, sadly, with the passing of the Bush administration. Today Unger calls Rove the most powerful political OPERATIVE in America, in charge of the American Crossroads Super Pac and the non-profit affiliate, Crossroads GPS. Rove has offered up a massive war chest for Mitt Romney’s campaign. According to Mr. Unger the overriding and massive ambition of Karl Rove is “the forging of a historic re-alignment of America’s political landscape, the transformation of America into effectively a one-party state.” We all know that party will NOT represent 99% of the citizenry.
Unger’s explains the first phase of Rove’s rise to power back in Texas:
“.... he took an issue that seemed obscure at the time, known as tort reform. It’s giving the rights of people to collect in product liability cases. And he went to Philip Morris, who put him on his payroll, and to big pharmaceutical companies and so forth and said, "Look, you guys risk billions and billions of dollars in product liability. Give a few million to my candidates, and we will take over the Texas Supreme Court, we’ll take over the Texas legislature, we’ll put George W. Bush in as governor, and we will save you billions of dollars." And he did precisely that. And he ended up with—he flipped the—the Texas Supreme Court was completely dominated by Democrats. It became completely Republican. And he ended up with some very loyal campaign contributors, like Bob Perry—who is no relation to Rick Perry—Harold Simmons and so forth. These are Texas billionaires. And they’ve stuck with him for about 30 years.”
Perhaps Rove’s greatest evil victory thus far was during the 2004 election when he engineered colossal election corruption which guaranteed the White House for Bush another illegitimate term. He allegedly skewed the voter results from Ohio by colluding with its Republican Secretary of State as well as a pro-Republican Party corporation called SMARTech which provided for, among other things, electronic vote counting.
The following excerpts are from a 2007 article by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman on the incredible election corruption in Ohio in 2004 and how it gave the election fraudulently to Bush instead of Kerry, again with a great deal of help from Ken Blackwell, the Secretary of State of Ohio, who was a “some friends help you move bodies” staunch Republican. He and Karl Rove cronied up it seems to ensure the American people did not decide the 2004 election, as they were not allowed to decide the 2000 election. Instead that power went to the Republican Party political machine.
"... a critical late night period after the presidential election of 2004. In these crucial hours, computerized vote tallies may have been shifted to move the Ohio vote count from John Kerry to George W. Bush, giving Bush the presidency.
"Earlier that day, Rove and Bush flew into Columbus. Local election officials say they met with Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell in Columbus. Also apparently in attendance was Matt Damschroder, executive director of the Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Elections.
"These four men, along with Ohio GOP chair Bob Bennett, were at the core of a multi-pronged strategy that gave Bush Ohio's twenty Electoral College votes, and thus the presidency. Bennett and Damschroder held key positions on election boards in the state's two most populous counties, with the biggest inner city concentrations of Democratic voters.
"There were four key phases to the GOP's election theft strategy:
"Prior to the election, the GOP focused on massive voter disenfranchisement, with a selective reduction of voter turnout in urban Democratic strongholds. Blackwell issued confusing and contradictory edicts on voter eligibility, registration requirements, and provisional ballots; on shifting precinct locations; on denial and misprinting of absentee ballots, and more. Among other things, election officials, including Bennett, stripped nearly 300,000 voters from registration rolls in heavily Democratic areas in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo.
"On election day, the GOP focussed on voter intimidation, denial of voting rights to legally eligible ex-felons, denial of voting machines to inner city precincts, malfunctioning of those machines, destruction of provisional ballots and more.
"In Franklin, Cuyahoga and other urban counties, huge lines left mostly African-American voters waiting in the rain for three hours and more. A Democratic Party survey shows more than 100,000 voters failed to vote due to these lines, which plagued heavily Democratic inner city precincts (but not Republican suburban ones) throughout the state. The survey shows another 50,000 ballots may have been discarded at the polling stations. In addition, to this day, more than 100,000 machine-rejected and provisional ballots remain uncounted. The official Bush margin of victory was less than 119,000 votes.
snip
"Ultimately, however, it is the GOP's computerized control of the vote count that may have been decisive. ....
snip
"Despite the massive disenfranchisement of Ohio Democrats, there is every indication John Kerry won Ohio 2004. Exit polls shown on national television at 12:20am gave Kerry a clear lead in Ohio, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico. These "purple states" were Democratic blue late in the night, but, against virtually impossible odds, all turned Bush red by morning.
"Along the way, Gahanna, Ohio's "loaves & fishes" vote count, showed 4,258 ballots for Bush in a precinct where just 638 people voted. Voting machines in Youngstown and Columbus lit up for Bush when Kerry's name was pushed. Rural Republican precincts registered more than 100% turnouts, while inner city Democratic ones went as low as 7%. Warren County declared a "Homeland Security" alert, removed the ballot count from public scrutiny, then recorded a huge, unlikely margin for Bush.
snip
"But the most critical reversals may have come as exit polls indicated that despite massive Democratic disenfranchisement, and even with preliminary vote count manipulations, Kerry would win Ohio by 4.2%, a margin well in excess of 200,000 votes.
"The key to that reversal may be electronic. It has now become widely known that the same web-hosting firm that served a range of GOP websites, including the one for the Republican National Committee, also hosted the official site that Blackwell used to report the Ohio vote count.
"... the RNC tech network's hosting firm is SMARTech.com, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. SMARTech hosts georgew.bush.com, mc.org and gop.com among other Republican web domains, in a bank basement.
"Furthermore, the same hosting site that handled redirections from Blackwell's "official" site also handled the White House e-mail accounts that have become central to investigations of the Gonzales purge of eight federal prosecutors, some of whom were themselves involved in vote fraud investigations. [these emails were suspiciously later erased and the alleged person who erased them, Mike Connell, killed in a plane crash.]
"Conflicts of interest in programming services and remote-access capability appear throughout the RNC's computer networks, Rove's secret White House e-mail, and the electronic vehicles used by Blackwell to finally reveal his "official" presidential vote counts for Ohio 2004.
"One factor may be Ohio's electronic touch-screen voting systems, on which were cast more than 800,000 votes in an election decided by about one-seventh that total. Such vulnerabilities, among other things, have been confirmed in exhaustive reports by Conyers's Committee, by the Government Accountability Office, by the Carter-Baker Commission, by Princeton University, by the Brennan Center, and by others.
"But overall, the electronic record of every vote in Ohio was transmitted to the Secretary of State's office, and hosted in real time in Chattanooga. Under such circumstances, the joint hosting of the White House e-mail system and accessibility by Blackwell and Rove to the same computer networks linked to the Ohio vote count, takes on an added dimension”
Craig Unger writes of the corporation SMARTech:
And this company started off as a very legitimate high-tech company in Chattanooga during the dot-com boom. It later reformed under a different name and different ownership, but by then it had become very much a political operation. So, this was a highly, highly partisan Republican high-tech company. It hosted—its biggest clients included the Bush-Cheney campaign, it included Jeb Bush, it included the Republican National Committee. It streamed live the convention, the Republican convention.
And somehow or other, in 2004, in the state of Ohio, which was the single most crucial state in the Electoral College, when it came to the actual voting, the secretary of state of Ohio, a guy named Ken Blackwell—and the secretary of state’s job is to—part of it is to ensure fair, nonpartisan elections—happened to be co-chair of the Bush campaign. Now, there’s no conflict there. And he gave a contract to host the fail oversight for the Republican—rather, for the votes in 2004, to none other than SMARTech. And this is where things went a little crazy.
snip
... Well, about at 11:14 p.m., things started to happen, exactly 11:14 p.m. And as the votes came in, it was clear it was going to be an all-nighter in terms of the results. And around 11:00, Florida was called for Bush, and that meant the entire fate of the election hinged on Ohio. So, suddenly—excuse me—the servers for the [Ohio] secretary of state’s computers were flooded with queries.
... And they needed to lock into the fail oversight in Chattanooga with SMARTech. And this is where the results went a little crazy. And suddenly, an enormous number of irregular returns came in, and the votes shifted. The exit polls had shown Kerry winning Ohio, and therefore the election. And it looked like he had won the presidential election. I remember that day vividly because I was getting reports from the exit polls, and I went around telling people it looked like Kerry had won. But there was a 6.7 percent difference between the exit polls and the actual results. And as a result, the election ended up going to Bush. And that was the entire story.
snip
—one of the things that’s very interesting is how evidence disappeared again and again and again in this case. And what you saw is that in all of these scandals—in the U.S. attorneys scandal and the Valerie Plame scandal—Rove’s emails were subpoenaed, and they were hosted at SMARTech. And, oops, millions of emails mysteriously disappeared. Now, these were supposedly under the—protected by the Presidential Preservation Records Act [Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act], and the destruction of government documents is a very, very serious crime. But every attempt to investigate turns up naught.
Unger sees more serious election manipulation occurring again under the effective machinations of Karl Rove and others, with Republican-loyal or even Democratic-party loyal corporations becoming more and more involved with election processing and oversight. Winning uber alles in gamesmanship never statesmanship-oriented American politics.
Could this happen again? I think—you know, I think electronic voting is very, very dangerous, and it’s very easy to manipulate. But I also found evidence in Ohio of extraordinary kinds of fraud that could happen with punchcard ballots, as well, through very elaborate and byzantine means of—known as cross-voting. And I think a lot of people don’t realize, when you go into a voting booth and you see another voting booth nearby, if you voted the same way in the adjoining booth, in the wrong booth, or if your punchcard is counted by the different computer, it would register to a different vote. And we saw this happened—
snip
And we saw a lot of that in Ohio. And the giveaway was in an African-American precinct, where there were third-party people on the ballot there, including a white supremacist—someone linked to a white supremacist party. And suddenly in this African-American precinct, this—and African Americans tend to be very, very disciplined Democratic voters. They’ve been 95 percent Democratic in the past. And suddenly, this man who is linked to a white supremacist got 40 percent of the vote. And you could see exactly what had happened.
snip
He [Rove] faces, and the Republican Party faces, an extraordinary challenge in the—with the Hispanic boom. There are now 50 million Hispanics in the United States. In 2020, at the current rate of growth, there will be 70 million. If they start to vote, they tend to lean heavily Democratic, and you will start to see states like Texas and Arizona flip from red to blue. And Rove is trying to stop that. And one campaign he’s supported is what is known as a campaign fighting voter fraud. And as I found out, I think the fraud about—the Brennan Center at the NYU School of Law says the fraud about—voter fraud is itself a fraud. And there have only been 10 documented cases of people voting under false names in the first decade of this century. So, why—but in response to that minuscule number, there are campaigns in more than 30 states to have voter—require voter IDs and so forth. This will inhibit voting from new immigrants, from minorities, from the elderly and so forth, who, again, lean heavily Democratic.
Boss Rove. How can this cockroach of a human being, and others like him, continue to game and effectively annihilate the democratic system? Apparently, very easily.
[cross-posted on correntewire and sacramento for democracy]
----------------
Libby, the saddest of all, is that politicians never face justice..we have this too, in my country...What can one say, when the law makers, can not face their laws, when the law makers can not, are feared to make a law, that will drive them to justice for their wrong doings, I think talking about democracy, only make own feel fear to say the least. Thank you for sharing, Libby !!
Thanks for the background. I'm thinking that voter suppression and intimidation in this year's race is itself a kind of voter fraud, though I don't know whether that's the legalistically correct term.
President Romney!
Lemme see...I think that begins on January 20th, 2013.
Should be an interesting beginning.
Wonder what color dress Ann will wear to the inauguration?
Lemme see...I think that begins on January 20th, 2013.
Should be an interesting beginning.
Wonder what color dress Ann will wear to the inauguration?
Stathi, thanks for your comment. You are so right about the profound lack of accountability among the crony criminal politicians' and the criminal corporatists' helped by the crony media and the other crony ruling class elites and pols, of course, and this extending to outrages committed by military personnel in foreign countries that end up at best with a slap on the wrist, enraging foreign populations to hate us and get their vengeance on our soldiers even more, but what the hey, these human lives whether soldiers or foreign peoples are cannon fodder to the deciders and they want perpetual war, so the corporations can walk on in over the devastated landscapes and dead bodies and set up shop. It is sad and surreal, Stathi! best, libby
Daniel, Jill Stein of the Green Party worked with the protesting citizens of Wisconsin to get rid of Scott Walker but there were voting fraud shenanigans going on there, too, along with a learned helpless "lemming" support once again for the status quo. Sigh. What do people need as a wake-up call? Thanks! best, libby
So, Frank, what are Obama and the Dems doing besides supporting an accountability-free environment for corporate and political crony criminals in DC? I'm thinking the lesser evil team especially Obama spends more time taking notes than changing the DOJ and giving it some teeth. Letting Goldman Sachs that has brought global economic wreckage get off with no jail time or prosecution for anyone and SEC fines that are laughable, that don't begin to impact after the obscene illegitimate profiteering. The Senate spent two years under Carl Levin building up a case against Goldman but crony of Barack's, no accountability, as the statute of limitations runs out though they are committing more fraud assuredly, but simply change the laws to make it legal? Is Bernie Maddoff the only poster boy for justice, and maybe only cuz he burned BOTH rich and poor. If you violate the poor or innocent foreigners, no prob. I'm thinking that corporate cronyism works both ways so will the Dems clean up corruption or betray citizens even more for their opportunism? Gov. Don Siegelman going to prison for a decade because he tried to fight Rove and his cronies and got nailed by cronied up regional judicial people operating like a mafia under their godfather, Karl Rove. Rove had Dem mayors and governors witch-hunted by those crooked judicial people he got into power. Selective prosecution. Rove, beloved or at least respected too much for his crooked game playing by an amoral media. Repubs were pulling mortal sins shenanigans but they went after technical and venial sins of any Dem politicians. Double standard doesn't begin to touch what they did. Joe Wilson declared he wanted Rove frog-walked out of DC in handcuffs. Instead, Rove is biggest pol operative in America today.
Long ago when Rove was a political operative in Texas the story goes just before an election for his client candidate Rove planted, or had an FBI buddy, plant a bug in the offices of his and his candidate -- their own offices -- and then called in the FBI to discover it (apparently with little info recorded on it) and then Rove kicked up such an indignant storm within the media accusing the other candidate of foul play!! Sympathy and outrage for Rove's candidate over that damn bug helped sweep him to victory as the innocent framed candidate tried to get a grip on what had happened to him.
I hate the level of criminality perpetrated in this case by an uber evil Republican who is coaching and inspiring the whole party at this level. I do not and cannot celebrate a lesser evil party that expects to win by default because they are "less evil" and not honoring seriously the constitution and the serious needs of the population. The media is pretty much useless except for a brave few. So, I will fight the Roves and the bottom feeding scum sucking Republicans, Frank, but don't expect me to honor the bottom feeding scum sucking Dems.
best, libby
Daniel, Jill Stein of the Green Party worked with the protesting citizens of Wisconsin to get rid of Scott Walker but there were voting fraud shenanigans going on there, too, along with a learned helpless "lemming" support once again for the status quo. Sigh. What do people need as a wake-up call? Thanks! best, libby
So, Frank, what are Obama and the Dems doing besides supporting an accountability-free environment for corporate and political crony criminals in DC? I'm thinking the lesser evil team especially Obama spends more time taking notes than changing the DOJ and giving it some teeth. Letting Goldman Sachs that has brought global economic wreckage get off with no jail time or prosecution for anyone and SEC fines that are laughable, that don't begin to impact after the obscene illegitimate profiteering. The Senate spent two years under Carl Levin building up a case against Goldman but crony of Barack's, no accountability, as the statute of limitations runs out though they are committing more fraud assuredly, but simply change the laws to make it legal? Is Bernie Maddoff the only poster boy for justice, and maybe only cuz he burned BOTH rich and poor. If you violate the poor or innocent foreigners, no prob. I'm thinking that corporate cronyism works both ways so will the Dems clean up corruption or betray citizens even more for their opportunism? Gov. Don Siegelman going to prison for a decade because he tried to fight Rove and his cronies and got nailed by cronied up regional judicial people operating like a mafia under their godfather, Karl Rove. Rove had Dem mayors and governors witch-hunted by those crooked judicial people he got into power. Selective prosecution. Rove, beloved or at least respected too much for his crooked game playing by an amoral media. Repubs were pulling mortal sins shenanigans but they went after technical and venial sins of any Dem politicians. Double standard doesn't begin to touch what they did. Joe Wilson declared he wanted Rove frog-walked out of DC in handcuffs. Instead, Rove is biggest pol operative in America today.
Long ago when Rove was a political operative in Texas the story goes just before an election for his client candidate Rove planted, or had an FBI buddy, plant a bug in the offices of his and his candidate -- their own offices -- and then called in the FBI to discover it (apparently with little info recorded on it) and then Rove kicked up such an indignant storm within the media accusing the other candidate of foul play!! Sympathy and outrage for Rove's candidate over that damn bug helped sweep him to victory as the innocent framed candidate tried to get a grip on what had happened to him.
I hate the level of criminality perpetrated in this case by an uber evil Republican who is coaching and inspiring the whole party at this level. I do not and cannot celebrate a lesser evil party that expects to win by default because they are "less evil" and not honoring seriously the constitution and the serious needs of the population. The media is pretty much useless except for a brave few. So, I will fight the Roves and the bottom feeding scum sucking Republicans, Frank, but don't expect me to honor the bottom feeding scum sucking Dems.
best, libby
ps to Frank, you gotta wonder why Kerry and the Dem Party were so d*mn wimpy about contesting the results and why the same Rove judicial cronies were not only not indicted for what they had done re the attorneys' scandal with Gonzalez, but that Obama let them stay on. WTF? libby
Libby, I do not expect you to support the "bottom feeding scum sucking Dems." I know many people who feel as you do...and I can understand, after a fashion, why you do. I simply do not agree, but I respect your right to feel it.
My comment, which I will repeat, did not go to that at all. My comment was:
President Romney!
Lemme see...I think that begins on January 20th, 2013.
Should be an interesting beginning.
Wonder what color dress Ann will wear to the inauguration?
President Romney! I has an interesting sound to it.
My comment, which I will repeat, did not go to that at all. My comment was:
President Romney!
Lemme see...I think that begins on January 20th, 2013.
Should be an interesting beginning.
Wonder what color dress Ann will wear to the inauguration?
President Romney! I has an interesting sound to it.
I never knew any of the details of how they pulled it off in Ohio, so this was very interesting. The use of electronic voting machines seems to make engineering such fraudulent counts frighteningly easy. I wish I knew some way that Rove, the Godfather of electoral fraud, could be brought to justice, but I doubt there is one. [r]
gamesmanship is, unfortunately, the Name of the Game....
There is no such thing as an accurate count of state votes- let alone national votes. The accuracy of the vote counting procedure is exceeded by the margin of error in counting, when we have such evenly divided factions. it is like trying to count the pages in all the books in the library of congress- and then realizing that the library of congress is actually just a catalog. No matter how hard we try at this point, the technology still does not exist to "Make Every Vote Count", especially when People like Me ( Systems Overseers) have access to the compilation of results from computerized voting.
One important chapter in this sad saga is the trip Rove took to Sweden, where he assisted the Swedish government and press in concocting a sexual assault case against Assange. Both women have asked to have the charges withdrawn, since they both invited him into their beds and had consensual sex with him. They only filed complaints after comparing notes and realizing he had slept with both of them in the same week. In one case Assange was guilty of having sex without a condom (illegal under Swedish law) - in the other he had sex with the woman and spent the night with her an subsequently initiated intercourse when she was still half asleep.
It was clearly reasonable for Swedish prosecutors to raise questions with both Assange and the women whether there was full consent. They did so, and both women requested the charges not go forward. Swedish prosecutors acquiesced - until Rove went over there and stuck his oar in.
It was clearly reasonable for Swedish prosecutors to raise questions with both Assange and the women whether there was full consent. They did so, and both women requested the charges not go forward. Swedish prosecutors acquiesced - until Rove went over there and stuck his oar in.
I read Unger's book "House of Bush House of Saud" years ago and it was very good. I haven't thought about him since until you mentioned him; I should check out his follow up books.
I recall they said something about the exit polls in "Orwell Rolls over in his Grave" and the response was that exit polls are no longer reliable, or so they claimed. the truth is that Exit polls may be one of the few polls that are relatively close to being representative since they poll actual voters. Further more the same people that say exit polls aren't reliable are the ones that promote obsessive pols presenting the elections as a horse race excluding sincere candidates like Stein. They do this for manipulative purposes and act as if these are reliable even though they almost certainly are much worse than the exit polls they dismiss.
for what it's worth Mark Crispin Miller who is mentioned in the Democracy Now page and is author of "Fooled Again" goes into much more detail in that book and so does Andrew Gumbel In "Steal This Vote;" which is what they do routinely.
I recall they said something about the exit polls in "Orwell Rolls over in his Grave" and the response was that exit polls are no longer reliable, or so they claimed. the truth is that Exit polls may be one of the few polls that are relatively close to being representative since they poll actual voters. Further more the same people that say exit polls aren't reliable are the ones that promote obsessive pols presenting the elections as a horse race excluding sincere candidates like Stein. They do this for manipulative purposes and act as if these are reliable even though they almost certainly are much worse than the exit polls they dismiss.
for what it's worth Mark Crispin Miller who is mentioned in the Democracy Now page and is author of "Fooled Again" goes into much more detail in that book and so does Andrew Gumbel In "Steal This Vote;" which is what they do routinely.
Hanging chads, electronic voter machines, straw polls that completely contradict the actual electoral results. America’s electoral system is a fraud. Ron Paul is the rightful republican candidate and he would have ousted Wall Streets Golden boy by a landslide, not that I personally have any love for Libertarianism. Auntie Cheney couldn’t have that not when they are so close to achieving their end game; WWIII. America now has two choices revolution either through the people or via military coup, or die. Its really that simple. All the rest is just a bunch of over analyzing pseudointellectual cackling by those who have to much to lose from the first choice, namely the majority of this forums constituents the North Eastern Establishment Liberals. You can blame Carl Rove if you wish. I don’t see what you could say about him that Tom Cordell has not already said. You are both right he is a criminal, a criminal that is very good at his particular brand of larceny. But when you do that you overlook the real problem which is capitalism itself. It’s a fatal disease that has went untreated for far to long. Its metastasized and left the Western economy ruined beyond repair (there is no way to fix over a hundred trillion dollars in derivatives) and the world on the brink of a nuclear annihilation. It requires radical surgery now. God help us!
G.W. Bush and Karl Rove stole both the 2000 and 2004 elections. Great post!
Rove is malicious little toad created in a laboratory with DNA from Heinrich Himmler. Too bad some lab assistant didn't drop the petri dish.
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