"The real travesty in all of this is, three months from now, when we are in the home stretch of this year’s political races, guys like Jeffrey Lord and Andrew Breitbart will be frequent guests on every news network in the country. Why do the networks—all of them, not just FOX News—gladly lend the air of legitimacy their cameras confer on their guests to these two, and the others like them? Because Lord and Breitbart are guaranteed to do the same thing they are doing now—make no sense, and promote nonsense."

High Tech Lynching Of Shirley Sherrod Has Begun by Kris Broughton at www.BigThink.com

Vote fraud.

Vote fraud has always been a key component of the SC political process.

Now my homestate's good ole boys have decided to go electronic. They should have hired better IT guys. Myself, I'm picturing a setup in a cheap, nondescript office park where the sight of grungy looking computer nerds would go unnoticed, and the amount of electronics equipment and ethernet connections wouldn't draw undue attention.

Cats siting around smoking cheap dope while they work on programs to recalculate vote totals that leave no footprint, eating chicken and watching Russian porn while they slog away at their computers. One of them makes a mistake in their code, or hits the wrong key because their fingers are greasy, and voila - Alvin Greene's ass is a motherfucking candidate for the U.S. Senate.

The odd silence from most of the powers that be on both sides of the aisle on this are because they are all in the know - the Dems know but can't prove it, or have made deals in the past to keep certain seats "D", and the Repubs know and don't want their system to be uncovered.

Fantasy scenario # 2 - Greene's father, who is a middle class retiree from the same federal program my father used to work for, gave him the money. Greene's father was not only a Clemson extension agent, which meant he was a black college graduate back in the 50's, when less than 5% of all African Americans graduated from ANY college, but a political mover and shaker in the Manning area. Or Greene is approached by someone who promises to reimburse him later if he can come up with the cash to register and wreak havoc on Vic Rawls for reasons unknown.

Greene goes along with the plan, intending to drop out once Rawls has been embarrased, but likes the limelight and realizes that the person who gavehim money/promised to reimburse him has no hold on him unless he wants to implicate himself in this mess.

This sounds ridiculous, but it makes much more sense than Robert Ford's idiotic assertion that "black people knew he was black because he had an "e" on the end of his name, and assertion that is nevertheless being followed up BY THE MEDIA as if Diebold is known for having impregnable security features on its voting machines.

We have entirely too much faith in electronics and computer software to be infallible.

And the parachute media folks have no idea what levels SC politicians are willing to stoop to dominate the political process.

What probably happened? The same thing that normally happens when two no name candidates run for the same slot - one of them gets more votes than the other for no particular reason at all.

Don't believe systemic vote fraud is plausible? Ask Ohio Democrats why their votes have been tabulated in Tennessee lately.

There was no mention anywhere in this piece of the GOP hating Obama because he was black - that's just icing on the cake for the Repubs, because they would hate anyone who did such a masterful job of using their TACTICS and STRATEGIES to achieve DIFFERENT ENDS.

Nope, these boys have been had at their own game.

I know most of you don't read my home blog, Brown Man Thinking Hard, but I've said it before and I'll say it again - Obama is an opportunist who happens to be on the Dems side.

I grew up in a Republican household, running paperwork to county leaders and attending meetings on the county and state level in the seventies in the south, when the GOP was still struggling to gain dominance.

They realized that nobody naturally wants to follow a political party, so they did what they knew best - they SOLD people on it, the way you sell country club memberships to the people who don't live in the country club neighborhood in order to keep the club in the black.

These aren't words I ever hear Dems use - dominance or salesmanship - but they are ones they will have to learn in order to get what they want.

The GOP is selling superiority.

They are handing out posters of wealth to people who can barely afford a six pack, and they are convincing these people that the wealth in this poster could be had, even if they don't have aan education, even if they have no drive, even if they don't have the ability to motivate themselves, much less the people they would need to motivate to make them rich.

These guys are good.

But they are not unbeatable. They are not invincible.