NOAM CHOMSKY ON THE ELECTION

From his blog:

As to fraud, etc. I don’t think it is a major issue, even if true. The election had about the significance of tossing a coin to pick a king. If the coin was slightly biased, that’s unfair, but not the main issue. The much more important point is that the opinions of the majority of the population were excluded from the political arena on major issues. People voted for the imagery concocted by the PR industry. Exit polls reveal that clearly. But to discover whether the imagery is accurate, we have to compare people’s attitudes and beliefs with the actual programs. There’s plenty of interesting and credible evidence on this, and when we investigate it, we discover that people were hopelessly misled. Voters for both candidates assumed, overwhelmingly, that the candidates held their views, which is demonstrably false. In fact, voters recognized that they could not vote on agenda/policies/programs/ideas—about 10% gave that as their reasons—but only on imagery. And in a society based crucially on deceit (what is advertising?), it is quite natural that the political managers and the PR industry will run elections the same way. To repeat, there is overwhelming evidence that the opinions of the majority of the population on major issues were simply off the agenda, either within the political parties or in mainstream discussion, with rare exceptions. That democratic deficit seems to me far more important than the possibility that the coin that was tossed was biased.

Click here for the rest.

I guess that kind of puts it all into perspective: this is the one thing that the self-righteous Democrat Nader and Green haters just don't get; it's not really about electoral politics in the long run. It's about educating the population, organizing, and pressuring our leaders to do the right thing. Nonetheless, exposing any possible Republican electoral fraud would score a lot PR points inasmuch as symbolizing to most people how much of a sham our "democracy" actually is. Chomsky's right on the issues, but, if the allegations of a GOP vote-scam are true, he's missing out on a valuable line of strategy.

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