Florida Pilot

A compendium of random thoughts from a former Washington Beltway insider who is now having a lot more fun flying small airplanes in Central Florida.

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

The Huffington Fantasy

Leave it to Arriana Huffington to publish a story that is so ridiculous and nonsensical that only someone without a brain could possibly be conned into believing it.

Here is an extract of the document written by Jim Lampley

"At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. You can look it up.
People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election.
And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil."

My first thought was to wonder why anyone would publish a story like this only a few days after the sports bookmakers were completely wrong on the Kentucky Derby. Lampley's logic could be used to "prove" that Bellamy Road actually won the Derby and it was only due to blind track judges and a compliant media that Giacomo was declared the winner. After all, only once in the history of the Derby had a horse with greater than 50-1 odds won the race and that was so long time ago that it was probably not even true.

Of course, in the six months since the election, the exit pollsters have been busy trying to fix their sampling and reporting procedures so that their figures better reflect the actual poll results in the future. Of course, Lampley would prefer to throw out the election results themselves since he apparently doesn't agree with them.

It is even more ridiculous to suggest that the media were somehow complicit in covering up a theft of the election. The media were so pro-Kerry that Dan Rather's use of blantantly forged documents to disparage the President was widely publicized; much more so than the facts that had to be forced out by the blogsphere. Rather's willingness to donate whatever reputation for integrity he had to the Kerry cause is but one example of how committed the mainstream media were for a Kerry victory.

I'm sure there are a lot of us out here who have voted Republican only to be disappointed in many respects. A lot of us are looking for some credible alternatives. John Kerry was not one.

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