Unexpected, jarring events — such as Sen. John Kerry's relatively decisive loss to President Bush in last week's election — can cause a cognitive dissonance that some seek to explain by denying "apparent" reality rather than coming to terms with the meaning of that reality.
The campaign to discredit the results of the election is picking up some modest steam. We will look at those bones of contention, but first an object lesson in conspiracy theory.
The Bulge
The question of "Bush's bulge" during the first presidential debate has been put to rest: it was the strap of his bulletproff vest, according to Albert Eisele and Jeff Dufour of The Hill:
- sources in the Secret Service told The Hill that Bush was wearing a bulletproof vest, as he does most of the time when appearing in public. The president’s handlers did not want to admit as much during the campaign, for fear of disclosing information related to his personal security while he was on the campaign trail.
The suspicion that Bush was, indeed, wearing something under his coat was given further credence by Dr. Robert M. Nelson, a senior research scientist for NASA and Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and an international authority on image analysis, who conducted tests while working at home on his own computers.
“I am willing to stake my scientific reputation to the statement that Bush was wearing something under his jacket during the debate,” Nelson told Salon.com. “This is not about a bad suit. And there’s no way the bulge can be described as a wrinkled shirt.”
Election Results
So, what of the election itself? Are the results legitimate? The nation and the mainstream press seem to think so. Evidence of the latter is apparent in the lead to a NY Times story from yesterday about problems with vote systems and counting:
- Voters in Ohio delivered a second term to President Bush by a decisive margin. But the way the vote was conducted there, election law specialists say, exposed a number of weak spots in the nation's election system.
Article comments
1 - Hal Pawluk
I don't know about the other stuff, but one can't say "Nelson was right about that, wrong in his assumption about what the bulge was" and know it to be true.
This is something we only have the word of "sources" for.
That's not proof.
2 - Eric Olsen
We don't have irrefutable evidence, no, but The Hill is a pretty good source with lots of inside contacts, and it certainly seems to make the most sense.
And we CAN say that nelson never even mentioned the possibility of the bulletproof vest in his Salon piece, which seems odd for one so bent on finding the facts.
The overarching point is that people tend to find what they are looking for, kind of like the administration's intelligence on WMD in Iraq
3 - Hal Pawluk
Agreed. And I'm just saying that the explanations on either side aren't much use.
Bush knows about the bulge, but his answer when asked didn't seem too credible, so it was a point for the receiver side.
The machines still could have been hacked and we'll never know unless, if they were, a perpetrator steps out and tells us.
The point for me is that we need an independent trustworthy voting system, and we don't have it now.
But for now, the big issue isn't history but to see if we can minimize the damage about to be done in his second term.
So far, Iraq doesn't look good, the deficit doesn't look good, Social Security is another imminent disaster ...