It Is The Wolves In The White House Who Are Preying Upon Democracy,

[Guest guest]

http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/04/10/edi04079.html

 

October 25, 2004

 

It Is The Wolves In The White House Who Are Preying Upon Democracy,

And Gorging On Its Carcass

 

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

 

Here's the crucial difference between the GOP theft of the election in

2000 and their efforts to steal the 2004 White House campaign.

 

In 2000, they were outside the government trying to steal their way

in, with Florida as ground zero in the mugging of democracy.

 

In 2004, they ARE the government: controlling the legislative,

executive and judicial branches.

 

They have appointed enough federal judges, combined with past right

wing appointees in the Reagan and Bush I administrations, so that any

election initiative that they support or oppose will by upheld or

struck down by an ideologically driven right wing judge somewhere

along the appellate route. Their moles are in place and ready to do

what they were appointed to the bench for: to protect the Bush regime

and the interests of the Republican Party and its fundamentalist

supporters over the rights of Americans to choose their government.

 

It is like trying to win a football game when all the referees work

FOR the opposing team.

 

If you are voting in a state with a Republican Secretary of State and

a Republican Governor -- such as Florida and Ohio -- you are voting in

an environment where the Bush Cartel is using its surrogates to try

and suppress every Democratic vote that it can.

 

Already, through a variety of schemes, including working to ensure

that provisional votes are not counted, felon purges, the organized

dumping of Democratic registration forms, improper registration of

Democrats (to ensure that their right to vote will be denied when

challenged by a " rent-a-thug " poll watcher), to mysterious phone calls

to Democratic voters telling them to vote in the wrong precinct, to

the collection of absentee ballot requests for Dems that never show up

at the election office, to the illegal registration of students and

naturalized citizens as Republicans -- and including many, many more

GOP dirty tricks -- the Republican Party has nationalized their

Democratic voter suppression activity, using the multiple strategies

that they tried out in Florida -- and many, many more new ones. Most

of them are actions that are punishable as felonies.

 

But nothing will be as disgraceful an assault on democracy as the

hiring of 3,600 " rent a Republican thugs " -- at $100 a day -- to

intentionally intimidate minority and other Democratic voters from

exercising their democratic and constitutional right by creating chaos

and a menacing environment through challenging voters in Democratic

(primarily minority) districts in Ohio. Such an onslaught of

challenges on election day has the intent of tying up polling booths

through lengthy challenges (a process that was successful in dooming

the ill-fated voter recount in Florida in 2000 even before the Supreme

Court stepped in), thus forcing voters to abandon unfathomable waits

as each voter is challenged, requiring a lengthy review process of

each individual's right to vote. Secondly, the very presence of

hostile GOP thugs -- and the boastful public promotion of this

strategy by the Republican Party of Ohio (at the behest of Karl Rove,

you can be sure) -- is meant to keep fearful minority views from

coming to the voting booths in Ohio at all. This is Jim Crow redux.

 

Such an effort, among a multitude of voter suppression tactics adopted

by the male Katherine Harris of Ohio, Secretary of State Ken

Blackwell, a right wing Bush puppet (he's even foamingly at the mouth

anti-gay a la Rick " bestiality " Santorum), can impact tens of

thousands of votes to the detriment of John Kerry in what as shaping

up as the pivotal state of the election. Current projections indicate

that Bush cannot win the election without winning Ohio, where he is

currently behind in the polls.

 

That is why Blackwell -- like Katherine Harris, a Bush state campaign

co-chair -- has gone to such lengths as requiring that voter

registration forms would only be accepted on paper with a certain

weight (which he only announced shortly before the registration

deadline), until he was forced to stop implementing the requirement.

 

The refusal to honor provisional ballots in Ohio cast in a different

precinct, first struck down and then upheld by a federal appeals

court, could result in the loss of tens of thousands of Kerry votes.

Although the justice department had no standing in the case, John

" Bush owns my butt " Ashcroft filed an amicus brief on a similar

provisional voting case in Michigan, even though the federal

government was not a party to the suit. He was signaling to Republican

office holders throughout the U.S. that the Bush Cartel was going to

do everything possible to squash hundreds of thousands of provisional

votes, and that they should assist in anyway they could. That was his

message in the Michigan case. So you can see that this is an organized

effort of disenfranchisement, involving every level of the Bush Cartel

and their hired " consultants. "

 

With all the right wing judges now sitting on the federal bench, not

to mention the 5-4 " Bush at any price, democracy be damned " majority

on the Supreme Court, it is only a matter of time before any appeal

that favors democracy and voting rights is struck down in favor of

Bush by some judicial ideologue who takes orders from the Federalist

Society and the Bush Administration.

 

It should not be forgotten that William Rehnquist, the Chief Justice

of the Supreme Court and one of the felonious five of 2000, got his

start in right wing Republican politics by serving as a " poll watcher "

in Arizona and aggressively challenging the rights of minorities to

vote as a means of disenfranchisement. (This was something that

Rehnquist committed perjury about in his confirmation hearings, by the

way. But the Democrats, when the truth emerged, were forgiving, as

always, and didn't put up a stink about our Chief Justice being found

out to have lied under oath.)

 

So even before most of the country votes on November 2, it is likely

that John Kerry will have been denied thousands upon thousands of

votes, well in excess of one or two hundred thousand possibly, due to

a national GOP strategy of voter suppression, intimidation and dirty

tricks, using multiple strategies.

 

If this is the kind of democracy that Bush is having our soldiers die

for, it is only further proof that he is a fraud. In his mind, a

democracy is the exercise of voting by white Christians who want to

turn America into a theocracy. The votes of minorities and Democrats

are to be discounted as much as possible because they do not represent

votes of " saved Christians " who are attempting to impose their faith

and morality upon a nation they consider " fallen from God. "

 

The denial of voting rights as a national strategy is not just a

return to the days of Jim Crow, it is an indication that the Bush

Cartel has a different perspective on democracy than what is

guaranteed under our Constitution. It is the right to vote based on

one's faith and party affiliation. It is the structuring of a state

apparatus aimed at stifling democracy as we know it and replacing it

more with something that is a cross between Franco's fascism and

Stalin's Soviet style of rule.

 

In a story in the Boston Globe, it was revealed that White House Chief

of Staff Andrew Card recently told a gathering of Maine Bush

supporters that the man in the White House regards Americans as

10-year-olds who need a strong father figure to lead them in this time

of peril. That is the model upon which a fascist leader rules, not the

model of Constitutional democracy upon which our nation is founded.

 

The pre-election voter suppression currently being carried out by Rove

and company is an attempt to further erode our democracy, as the Bush

Cartel has begun the dismantling of the democratic process ever since

it first hijacked the election in 2000.

 

The Bush Family knows that Jeb Bush will carry Florida for Bush no

matter what. He has already succeeded in using multiple tactics to

suppress Democratic voters, particularly minorities, including

minority voter intimidation in Orlando using state police and the

second round of a felon's purge that was allegedly halted, but not

really stopped by the individual Republican-run counties. As Tom DeLay

has done in the House of Representatives several times in the past

four years, Jeb will use a variety of means to make sure that his

candidate (in the House it was Bush-backed bills) " wins " even if by

one vote. If push comes to shove, there are always the Diebold

electronic voting machines. Jeb has allowed Diebold to keep its

software counting system " proprietary, " meaning that the votes in

Florida and wherever electronic voting machines are used (there are

two other pro-Republican companies supplying such machines) for the

counting of our votes has been " privatized. " Republican-affiliated

companies are counting the votes of America, and we don't have the

right to know how they are counting them.

 

And don't forget that it was the CEO of Diebold, which is ironically

located in the Buckeye State, who pledged that he would do everything

possible to carry Ohio for Bush.

 

We take him at his word.

 

We trust the Kerry campaign, which has said that it is prepared to

take on all legal challenges, has listened closely to that pledge. It

is a pledge of allegiance to the Bush Cartel, not to America.

 

The institutional integrity of our democracy is at stake in this election.

 

Having once gotten away with the theft of the voting process, the Bush

Cartel has had four years to plan its second national robbery, now

operating from inside the government itself. They don't just have Jeb

to do the dirty work for them; they have the entire national

government, including the Department of (In) Justice.

 

Iraqis should take note that when Bush talks about freedom and

democracy, he is using code words for a rigged election.

 

That is what democracy means to the Bushes: winning at all costs, the

voters be damned.

 

What they have done in the pre-election period is to literally make

Democratic votes vanish before they can even be cast. That is what

they did with the infamous felon's list in Florida in 2000. Now, their

system of disenfranchisement is much more multi-pronged and elaborate.

 

And now, like a cancer upon our Constitution, they have spread the

disease throughout the nation.

 

If Kerry wins, Karl Rove plans to cry fraud at the polls, and then

shop around for a judge who agrees with him that the Democrats stole

the election.

 

If you think that is brazen hypocrisy, just remember Rove doesn't give

a damn.

 

He knows that Nino Scalia will be camped out at the Supreme Court

willing to rescue Bush from defeat, using whatever illogical partisan

argument is necessary to get the dirty deed accomplished.

 

After all, the Bush Cartel, their corporate cronies, and the

theocratic right own our government, don't they?

 

If they didn't, they might ironically argue, then how did they come to

power? They weren't elected in 2000; that's for sure.

 

They run elections by a different set of rules. The voting is just an

inconvenience to them. Their challenge is to come up with foolproof

ways to rig the election.

 

Let's just hope that their plans have a fatal flaw, such as the will

of the people triumphing over the treachery of the Bush thugs.

 

It's the only thing that can bring an end to an administration that

has betrayed the American Revolution, our Constitution, and the right

of one-person, one vote.

 

On September 11th, 2001, more than 3,000 people were horrifically

murdered by terrorists as the " leaders " of this nation ignored

warnings of an impending strike. It was an assault upon the United States.

 

But it is the wolves in the White House who are preying upon

democracy, and gorging on its carcass.

 

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL