No postponement, just bedlam at the polls and a low turnout on the West Coast is Bush’s plan for ‘victory’. This Online Journal piece by the wonderful Wayne Madsen suggests a provocative scenario. I have previously written about my puzzlement over why Ridge would publicize that the government is making election postponement plans even if they are. Many have noted the implausibility of a postponement even in the midst of a national emergency. So okay, the point of such a dramatic announcement at this time wasn’t that the Republicans really plan to pull off a postponement, I concluded, but merely to sow terror. This article suggests that they are setting the stage for a particular strategy. The Republicans will wait for the polls to close in the East to see how they did in the contested states in the early time zones. If they need to, he suggests, a properly-timed announcement of an imminent threat of an attack in California would allow them to win the state even without closing down the polls there, because the pandemonium it would precipitate would disproportionately disrupt working-class voters’ ability to get to the polls at the end of their work day. Low voter turnout is Republican turnout. If they needed to, they could do the same to Washington State as well. Can’t happen here, you say? The illegal disenfranchisement of thousands of predominantly African American voters in Florida won Bush the White House in 2000, so why not? Madsen doesn’t want to be in the position of saying ‘I told you so’; he suggests steps that democratic-minded (with a small ‘d’) people can take now to stop a plan of this sort. There’s no harm in being prepared. Since it is unlikely that too many California or Washington legislative or gubernatorial staff read Online Journal, readers there ought to bring this to their attention….