Fears for the future (updated)

I fear McCain will "win" the election. I expect to hear reports of the highest voter turn-out ever. We'll be told that Palin invigorated the right wing religious base, and that they turned out in record numbers. We'll also be told that whites who supported Obama in public, voted for McCain in their "moment of truth" alone in the polling booth. (I'm certainly not the first to say this, the idea was put in my head by NYU media professor Mark Crispin Miller.)

The truth will be that McCain-Palin lost, but people in high places rigged the election for them, as the did for Bush in y2k and '04. The results will look close enough (52% to 48% or so*) that we'll all kind of accept it, even though we really should know better. We'll be so sick of campaigning by then, that no one will wants to fight on and dig up the dirt. The "fact" that 52%* of Americans are motivated by race or religion will make us unwilling to talk politics amongst strangers for a while, so we won't be as likely to notice the fallacy of it. That's how it happened in 2004 [again, see Miller who presents intriguing evidence to support his claims].

By way of treachery McCain will be end up in office. Once there, he will further deregulate for his corporate masters. Bush will pardon himself on the way out the door, along with pardons for those same corporate masters, just to be safe.

If the Repubs steal the election, race relations will be set back by decades, there may even be rioting. Eventually things will "calm down", but the major parties will use Obama's "failure" as "evidence" to avoid running any non-whites for major office for a while. In the same way that the Dukakis-Ferraro failure kept women out of consideration until Hillary. (Palin was never considered, by the way. The FBI has admitted to not conducting the customary background check until after she was publicly announced, indicating that McCain, in his haste, sidestepped at least one of the traditional steps of the vetting process. She wasn't in the running, until 72 hours before being picked, when McCain was told his two top choices, Leiberman and Ridge would lead to a divided RNC over the abortion issue.) These will all be mistakes and self-serving excuses, but they'll feed it to us.

It's even possible McCain will end up suffering "health issues" either real, or faked, as MacGuire proposed to do to FDR (see my recent Smedley Butler post), and have to step down. At this point, Palin (who thinks Alaska will be God's holy redoubt when the Apocalypse comes) would assume the command of the US, and appoint a new Vice President without the vote of the US public. If it happened shortly after McCain was sworn in, the public would buy the notion that Palin wasn't ready to lead the country (she's not) and might be willing to sit by while all kinds of craziness went down since we were "in a crisis". Palin could be easily replaced by a General Secretary, to borrow yet another page from the Business Plot.

At that point, it'll be too late to fix the problem via anything short of storming the Bastille.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope my paranoia isn't justified. I want to believe that our nation is not too far gone, that there's still time to fix things, and that we have a shot at non-violent reform in our lifetime. I want to believe we can succeed via movements like the National Initiative for Democracy and Change Congress and just six dollars dot org. I think we can, I think we can, I think we can...

*:EDIT/Addendum: The 52%/48% split I was mentioning was intended to represent electoral college votes. Popular vote this year (after election fraud) will probably be something more like 44%/43%/4%/3%/3%/3%. Prior to, or in the miraculous absence of voter fraud, it'll be more like 30%/46%/10%/7%/4%/3%. I suspect the reality will involve the highest levels of 3rd party voting since Ross Perot, and not counting him the highest since Teddy Roosevelt.