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For Republicans, the 2004 presidential
election was little short of miraculous: Behind in the Electoral
College tally in the days leading up to the election, behind
even on the very afternoon of the vote, the Bush ticket staged
a stunning comeback. The exit polls, usually so reliable,
turned out to be wrong by an unprecedented 5 percent in the
swing states. Conservatives argued—and the media agreed—that
“moral values” had made the difference. In his new book renowned
critic and political commentator Mark Crispin Miller argues
that it wasn’t moral values that swung the election—it
was theft. While the greatest body of evidence comes from
the key state of Ohio—where the Democratic staff of
the House Judiciary Committee found an extraordinary onslaught
of Republican-engineered vote suppression, election-day irregularities,
old-fashioned intimidation tactics, and illegal counting procedures—similar
practices (and occasionally worse ones) were applied in Florida,
Oregon, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and even
New York. A huge array of anomalies, improper practices, and
blatant violations of the law all, by a truly remarkable coincidence,
happened to swing in the Bush ticket’s favor. This pattern—not
one overwhelming fraud but thousands of little ones—is,
in Miller’s view, the new Republican electoral strategy.
This incendiary new book presents massive documentation that
the election was stolen and describes the mind-set, among
both the major parties and the media, that could permit it
to happen again.
Mark Crispin Miller is a professor
of media studies at New York University and a well-known public
intellectual. His writings on film, television, propaganda,
advertising and the culture industries have appeared in numerous
journals and newspapers, including The Nation and The
New York Times. He is the author of The Bush Dyslexicon:
Observations on a National Disorder and Cruel and Unusual:
Bush/Cheney’s New World Order. A frequent commentator
on TV, radio and the Internet, Miller has appeared on Frontline,
The PBS Newshour, The O’Reilly Factor,
Washington Journal, as well as many other television
shows, and has been a guest on countless radio programs. He
is a regular commentator on Air America, appearing often on
Morning Sedition and The Al Franken Show.
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