The Doctrine of Pre-emptive Excuses

I'm watching Wolf Blitzer on CNN today and Ken Mehlman is on talking about how unreliable exit polling is, how it all has an inherent bias. He had the nerve to cite the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections as proof that exit polling is problematic. This is a man who speaks for a government that promotes the use of exit polling themselves to as a means of safeguarding elections in several nations:

The reliability of exit polls is so generally accepted that the Bush administration helped pay for them during recent elections in Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine. Testifying before the House Committee on International Relations Dec. 7, John Tefft, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, explained that the Bush administration funded exit polls because they were one of the "ways that would help to expose large-scale fraud." Tefft pointed to the discrepancy between exit polls and the official vote count to argue that the Nov. 22 Ukraine election was stolen.

The hypocrisy is jaw-dropping.

Mehlman also said that they are already getting data back from the early voting period that show that the Republican exceeded expectation by double digit in every single jurisdiction where early voting was held. That would be truly amazing, would it not?

This guy sounds like he's faithfully setting up their pre-emptive excuses for what, if it transpires, would be the most blatant electoral theft yet.

Just imagine: "Supermajority for the GOP! Who saw that coming? It just showz-ta-go-ya, you can't trust polling at all. Listen to Ken Mehlman instead."

I'll post the video if it becomes available.

UPDATE: Wolf is now talking to CNN's impartial and objective political analyst from the American Enterprise Institute (though Wolf somehow, for the 1-millionth time, forgot to tell us that), Bill Schnieder who studiously informed us that this election is not just about Iraq and that voters think things like terrorism and the economy are more important. "The most trust name in news", ladies and gentlemen.