Clinton win now bringing out conspiracy theorists (updated for 2016)

Editor's note: This post was originally written for 2008, after Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire primary win. Everything below the divider line was updated May 29, 2016, due to a Twitter exchange that eventually evolved Friedman.

Brad Friedman of the Brad Blog, normally (sometimes; see below) a much more sober writer, claims hacked Diebold election machines may have given Clinton her victory.

Of course, this feeds off the memes of “Clinton the old insider” and “The GOP really wants to face Clinton.” Yes, Diebold machines have been hacked, and we’ve still not done enough nationally about the problem.

But, the win is explicable. In fact, per Talking Points Memo, Zogby said his polls were showing a last-day shift, but it was too late, and too small a sample, to run with.

And, thus, per Friedman's initial comment, and my initial response, raising hacking as a quite possible first idea (which he did), is contra-empirical.

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Just sent to me via Twitter, Friedman has a 2009 post, which DOES support bad programming or other accidents as a problem, but is using it in a Twitter thread about fraud, when his post has no proof of that.

Fail.

I knew, once we had gotten into this thread, that I had blogged about Friedman before, and then stopped reading him for years. Now I remember why.

I'm with him on paper ballots. No, I'm with myself on paper ballots, because I've blogged about this, and written newspaper columns about this, even, without any "help" from him. (And, if he's misusing the word "hacked" for accidental misprogrammings, then he's butchering English. But, he's not. Let's move on.)

I don't need the "help" of conspiracy theorists like him or Greg Palast, though.

And, via the magic of Twitter's "block" button, have taken care of that with Friedman. His last Tweet, with its arrogance, combined with a previous one questioning if I am a liberal or not (actually, I'm not, since I call myself a left-liberal), were two straws too much.

The other guy who sucked me in on this thread? I pointed to Bernie's Michigan win as "proof" that he must be a conspirator too. And, worse, yet, he's a JFK conspiracy guy.

And, Friedman himself may be a "JFK truther." At a minimum, he seems quite unskeptical about it. Actually, he cites Mark Lane favorably, so he IS a JFK truther. I don't know about Palast on this issue, but I know he's a 9/11 truther.

And, given that he has links to RFK Jr. talking about alleged fraud in Ohio 2004, when in reality, RFK Jr. is about as right about that as he is about autism, that only "seals the deal." (And, stuff like that is why I lament not starting this blog six months earlier, and doing with it more immediately, so I would have had more visibility during the 2004 election cycle.)

Meanwhile, contra the person who started this on Twitter, Bernie himself says the Democrats' process was not rigged. And, contra Friedman, whether or not it's easier to "flip" votes in an intraparty caucus, it is easier to stonewall legal attempts at remedies.

And, people like Friedman, Palast and low-tier conspiracy-thinker Sandernistas are supposed to have "the answers" about stolen elections? Please.

Nonsense like this is also why I am a skeptical left-liberal.

(Actually, Brad, I'm not a Green leaner. I'm a Trump infiltrator in disguise. Congrats on your swift knockdown of me. And that's about the snark level you're worthy of.)