Is Mitt Counting on Tagg?

The only way this twit can win is if someone who loves him owns the voting machines. Oh, wait...

There’s now a plausible explanation for why Robotron Romney is still campaigning for president.

A few weeks ago, even after POTUS’ disappointing performance in the October 3 Obama/Romney debate at the University of Denver (moderated by a comatose Jim Lehrer), he was ahead in the polls. Robotron may have enjoyed a small bump coming out of the Colorado debate – for an Oscar-worthy performance in which he depicted himself as a fired-up, moderate Republican even though the positions he embraced contradicted his own website and were disputed by his own aides – but I was one of those who doubted his campaign could recover from the revelation in mid-September that he decided to write off 47 percent of Americans. (Click here.)

So I cursed the media for irresponsibly promoting a false equivalency between the two contenders and focusing on campaign minutia instead of the candidates’ positions on issues. (While killing time in a hospital waiting room on October 5 – a family member was recovering from surgery – I watched a story on CNN about how the candidates’ body language and voice inflections during the Denver debate were examined on a frame-by-frame basis and “scientists” found that Romney was the stronger man.) And I started to relax, thinking the electorate might just have come to its senses after mistaking Dubya for a man of skill and talent a decade or so ago and then giving Democrats a “shellacking” during the 2010 midterms.

Then polls started tightening – Gallup even announced that Romney now leads Obama by six points – and the media became entangled in the earth-shattering question of whether or not Candy Crowley, moderator of the October 16 presidential debate at Hofstra University, was right to confirm facts in real time instead of just perching on a stool and letting Romney take credit for the polio vaccine, the Osmond Brothers’ success in Branson, Missouri, and Richard Petty’s induction into the NASCAR Hall of Fame. (Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Robotron was just eight years old in 1955 when Jonas Salk announced his vaccine.)

I was still scratching my head and reassuring myself that the only poll that really matters is the one on November 6 when I ran across a Facebook post claiming that Robotron’s pugilistic son Tagg – the nitwit who publicly announced that he wanted to punch the Leader of the Free World during the New York debate – is the proud new owner of several electronic voting machines to be used in Texas, Oklahoma, Washington, Colorado and Ohio. I’ve since seen stories about this at several blogs and websites. (One website insists that Tagg-owned machines are only being used in two counties in Ohio and that the “rigged machines myth” is harmful and distracting. I’m not sure who funds the site.)

I’m solidly in the “This is not good news” camp.

This explains why Robotron is still campaigning for an office that no one except the media thought he had a chance of capturing, legally, just a few weeks ago. It explains why he seems so unconcerned about the easily-verifiable claims and contradictions that make up the new and improved Willard Romney. It explains why his gaffes and half-truths are instantly treated as water under the bridge by the Fourth Estate. If they can’t win or suppress the vote, they’ll just change the totals. (It was none other than Joseph Stalin, the dictator who ruled the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1953, who said something to the effect of, “It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.”)

I tuned in to the final debate last night, moderated by avuncular Bob Schieffer of CBS News and held at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida. I thought the President was a tad aggressive in the beginning – causing Robotron to complain that attacks on him did not an agenda make – but he found his groove, slipped in a few good lines (“Governor Romney, the 1980s called…they want their foreign policy back”) and in my view demonstrated the same intelligence and eloquence that convinced over 69 million Americans to send him to the White House in 2008. It seemed to me that Obama edged out Robotron “I’m Still Speaking” Romney for the win, but when I visited a prominent political website afterwards, they claimed it was a tie. (Schieffer closed the event by quoting his late mother, who used to tell him, “Go vote. It makes you feel big and strong.” That’s what my mom said would happen if I drank milk and Anita’s mom told her would happen if she studied hard.) The race just doesn’t seem as close to me as I’m being led to believe. I wonder why.

Let’s talk about Ohio for a minute. No Republican candidate has ever lost that state and still made it to the White House. Consider this excerpt from an October 18 article at the Free Press website:

In 2004, in the dead of election night, an electronic swing of more than 300,000 votes switched Ohio from the John Kerry column to George W. Bush, giving him a second term. A virtual statistical impossibility, the 6-plus% shift occurred between 12:20 and 2am election night as votes were being tallied by a GOP-controlled information technology firm on servers in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In defiance of a federal injunction, 56 of Ohio's 88 counties destroyed all election records, making a recount impossible. Ohio's governor and secretary of state in 2004 were both Republicans, as are the governors and secretaries of state in nine key swing states this year.

It’s understandable that Tagg would want to help his dad’s floundering and not-even-close-until-now campaign if he could. And how better than to manipulate the vote count electronically in a few key counties? (Remember that Dubya took Florida by a mere 537 votes after recounts were halted.)

Sadly and surprisingly, there are quite a few “Romney/Ryan” lawn signs in my area. I’m not sure why. I just can’t accept the idea that anyone would want to return to the failed policies of the past, policies that favored the rich, took the economy to the brink of collapse, and included not one but two expensive, unjustifiable wars in which hundreds of thousands of human beings were murdered. I’ve got to think people just don’t know – or want to know – what might be going on under the surface, electronically and otherwise.


P.S. As an aside, I know it’s immature to make fun of someone’s name – and I’ve certainly been teased about mine – but what is with this Tagg/Bristol/Willow/Piper/Trig/Track crap anyway? Don’t GOP parents realize their offspring are already saddled with big negatives and naming them after forest nymphs and comic book characters doesn’t really help?


Tagg Romney photo courtesy The Tribune.
Debate photo courtesy Joe Raedle/Getty Images.


Sources: AllVoices.com, Forbes, Thinkprogress.org, AddictingInfo.org, The Hill, freepress.org, truth-out.org, Politico.com.