The Reality-Based Community? Part LXVIIs Paul Craig Roberts a Nut? And has Human Events gone crazy?
Mr. Roberts was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page from 1978 to 1980, and from 1981 to 1982, he was assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy. He was also a
former Townhall columnist.
And he's also a
moonbat of the first order today. He writes in Human Events (normally a pretty solid conservative publication), a column on the "stolen" election of 2004.
It's the usual paranoid drivel about how the exit polls were right and the vote counts were wrong, that Diebold changed the votes somehow:
The pre-election statement by Diebold's CEO that he would work to deliver the election to Bush was apparently no idle boast. In five states where the new "foolproof" electronic voting machines were used, the vote tallies differed substantially from the exit polls. Such a disparity is unusual. The chances of exit polls in five states being wrong are no more than one in a million.But they were wrong, and even the exit polling firms agreed that they were wrong. In fact, they were
ridiculously wrong in some cases. One exit poll had Kerry winning Pennsylvania by 20 points, and New Hampshire by 17. There was a zero percent probability of those results; to use the odds that Roberts quotes, it was less than one in a million chance. And in the end, Kerry took Pennsylvania by 2.5 points and New Hampshire by 1.5.
The other thing that nobody on the left ever mentions, is that non-exit polling had pretty consistently been projecting the actual results in the days leading up to the election. If you look at
Gerry Daly's page on Pennsylvania 2004, the last three polls had Kerry by 1,4,and 1 point respectively. The same
with New Hampshire; polling had shown Kerry winnning a tight race, which is exactly what happened. Ohio was
more of the same; the last four polls had shown Bush winning. So the outlier, the result that doesn't fit here, is the exit polling result.
Anyway, Paul Craig Roberts has clearly snapped. Get this wacky call to arms at the end of the Human Events piece:
Miller directs our attention to Bush's high-handed treatment of dissenters. If electronic voting machines programmed by private Republican firms remain in our future, dissent will become pointless unless it boils over into revolution.Roberts also writes regular columns at Justin Raimondo's
Antiwar.com. You may recall me writing about Raimondo's rather
bizarre conspiracy theories regarding 9-11 and the Israelis.
I don't have a clue as to what Human Events Online was thinking when they accepted this absurd column.
