Two Stories for the Price of One!

The first comes from the Drudge Report. Apparently those bastards at ABC are at it again. They have a tape from terrorists (apparently) threatening to destroy America before the election, suggestions that America will mourn in silence because we won't be able to count the dead. Well, instead of putting it on the air immediately, ABC is taking time to review and authenticate the tape. And they've turned it over to the CIA. How crazy is that? Since it would clearly help President Bush they are burying the tape while they "review it." If they were real Americans they would put it on the air immediately to show how confident the Terrorists are that they can breach President Bush's security.

As Atrios notes, isn't it bizarre that warnings of an impending attack by terrorists are a good reason to vote for President Bush who presumably we'd like to stop said impending attack?

Speaking of real Americans, I came across this story while trying to run down the Drudge Report story above. Apparently there's an article in the National Review Online that talks about how we need to preserve the Electoral College to protect real Americans. From Salon's War Room Blog, I lifted the following accurate analysis.

Of all the Republican arguments for maintaining the Electoral College, the one that Gary L. Gregg makes today in the National Review Online is both the most honest and the most appalling. Gregg's piece, titled a "Counting the Real People's Vote" argues that without the electoral advantage given to small, rural red states, American elections would be dominated by "a metropolitan elite who disdain the cultures and values of middle America." In other words, the urban vote needs to be diluted because it's so Democratic.

It's perfectly fair to argue that the Electoral College is needed to protect the interests of minority voters against the tyranny of the majority. But Gregg's argument is more sinister. By separating voters into "real people," whose votes should be given extra weight, and the "secular urban base" who don't quite count as fully legitimate citizens, he reveals one of the driving forces behind the modern Republican party -- a party which professes to embody Americanism while hating a great part of America. "Al Gore demonstrated in 2000 that the national popular vote can be won by appealing to a narrow band of the electorate heavily secular, single, and concentrated in cities," Gregg writes. This is an amazing statement -- if this band is so "narrow," how can it also be a major part of a popular majority? The answer, in the right-wing imagination, is that only a certain kind of citizens constitute real Americans, and thus are implicitly deserving of power despite the fact that they're a minority.

Nice to know that as a City Dweller I'm not a real American. But I guess as a Liberal I would have assumed that anyway.