Something Rotten in Ohio

[Guest guest]

http://www.alternet.org/story/22222/

 

Something Rotten in Ohio

 

By Gore Vidal, The Nation. Posted June 14, 2005.

 

The disturbing truths about the last election in Ohio have been

largely ignored by the press and the Congress.

 

Outside the oil and gas junta that controls two and a half branches of

our government (the half soon to be whole is the judiciary), there was

a good deal of envy at the late British election among those Americans

who are serious about politics. Little money was spent by the three

parties and none for TV advertising. Results were achieved swiftly and

cheaply. Best of all, the three party leaders were quizzed sharply and

intelligently by ordinary citizens known quaintly as subjects, thanks

to the ubiquitous phantom crown so unlike our nuclear-taloned

predatory eagle. Although news of foreign countries seldom appears in

our tightly censored media (and good news, never), those of us who are

addicted to C-SPAN and find it the one truly, if unconsciously,

subversive media outlet in these United States are able to observe

British politics in full cry.

 

I say " subversive " not only because C-SPAN is apt to take interesting

books seriously but also because its live coverage of the Senate and

the House of Representatives is the only look we are ever allowed at

the mouthpieces of our masters up close and is, at times, most

reflective of a government more and more remote from us, unaccountable

and repressive. To watch the righteous old prophet Byrd of West

Virginia, the sunny hypocrisy of Biden of Delaware -- as I write these

hallowed names, I summon up their faces, hear their voices, and I am

covered with C-SPAN goose bumps.

 

At any rate, wondrous C-SPAN has another string to its bow. While some

executive was nodding, C-SPAN started showing us Britain's House of

Commons during Question Time. This is the only glimpse that most

Americans will ever get of how democracy is supposed to work.

 

These party leaders are pitted against one another in often savage

debate on subjects of war and peace, health and education. Then some

600 Members of Parliament are allowed to ask questions of their great

chieftains. Years ago the incomparable Dwight Macdonald wrote that any

letter to the London Times (the Brits are inveterate letter writers on

substantive issues) is better written than any editorial in the New

York Times.

 

In addition to Question Time, which allows Americans to see how

political democracy works, as opposed to our two chambers of lobbyists

for corporate America, C-SPAN also showed the three party leaders

being interrogated by a cross section of, for the most part, youthful

subjects of the phantom crown and presided over by an experienced

political journalist. Blair was roughly accused of lying about the

legal advice he had received apropos Britain's right to go to war in

Iraq for the US oil and gas junta. This BBC live audience asked far

more informed and informative questions than the entire US press corps

was allowed to ask Bush et al. in our recent election. But Americans

are not used to challenging authority in what has been called wartime

by a President who has ordered invasions of two countries that have

done us no harm and is now planning future wars despite dwindling

manpower and lack of money. Blair, for just going along, had to deal

with savage, informed questions of a sort that Bush would never answer

even if he were competent to do so.

 

So we have seen what democracy across the water can do. All in all a

jarring experience for anyone foolish enough to believe that America

is democratic in anything except furiously imprisoning the innocent

and joyously electing the guilty. What to do? As a first step, I

invite the radicals at C-SPAN who take seriously our Constitution and

Bill of Rights to address their attention to the corruption of the

presidential election of 2004, particularly in the state of Ohio.

 

One of the most useful members of the House -- currently the most

useful -- is John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat who, in his capacity as

ranking minority member of the Judiciary Committee, led the

committee's Democratic Congressmen and their staffers into the heart

of the American heartland, the Western Reserve; specifically, into the

not-so-red state of Ohio, once known as " the mother of Presidents. "

 

He had come to answer the question that the minority of Americans who

care about the Republic have been asking since November 2004: " What

went wrong in Ohio? " He is too modest to note the difficulties he must

have undergone even to assemble this team in the face of the

triumphalist Republican Congressional majority, not to mention the

unlikely heir to himself, George W. Bush, whose original selection by

the Supreme Court brought forth many reports on what went wrong in

Florida in 2000.

 

These led to an apology from Associate Justice John Paul Stevens for

the behavior of the 5-to-4 majority of the Court in the matter of Bush

v. Gore. Loser Bush then brought on undeclared wars in Afghanistan and

Iraq, as well as the greatest deficits in our history and the

revelations that the policies of an Administration that -- much as

Count Dracula fled cloves of garlic -- flees all accountability were

responsible for the murder and torture of captive men, between 70

percent and 90 percent of whom, by the Pentagon's estimate, had been

swept up at random, earning us the hatred of a billion Muslims and the

disgust of what is called the civilized world.

 

Asked to predict who would win in '04, I said that, again, Bush would

lose, but I was confident that in the four years between 2000 and 2004

creative propaganda and the fixing of election officials might very

well be so perfected as to insure an official victory for Mr. Bush. As

Representative Conyers's report, Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong

in Ohio (3.2 MB PDF link), shows in great detail, the swing state of

Ohio was carefully set up to deliver an apparent victory for Bush even

though Kerry appears to have been the popular winner as well as the

valedictorian-that-never-was of the Electoral College.

 

I urge would-be reformers of our politics as well as of such

anachronisms as the Electoral College to read Conyers's valuable guide

on how to steal an election once you have in place the supervisor of

the state's electoral process: In this case, Ohio Secretary of State

Kenneth Blackwell, who orchestrated a famous victory for those who

hate democracy (a permanent but passionate minority). The Conyers

Report states categorically, " With regards to our factual finding, in

brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter

irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these

irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal

behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State Kenneth J.

Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. " In other

words, the Florida 2000 scenario redux, when the chair for Bush/Cheney

was also the Secretary of State. Lesson? Always plan ahead for at

least four more years.

 

It is well-known in the United States of Amnesia that not only did

Ohio have a considerable number of first-time voters but that

Blackwell and his gang, through " the misallocation of voting machines

led to unprecedented long lines that disenfranchised scores, if not

hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters. "

 

For the past few years many of us have been warning about the

electronic voting machines, first publicized on the Internet by

investigator Bev Harris, for which she was much reviled by the

officers of such companies as Diebold, Sequoia, ES & S, Triad; this last

voting computer company " has essentially admitted that it engaged in a

course of behavior during the recount in numerous counties to provide

'cheat sheets' to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets

informed election officials how many votes they should find for each

candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to

match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full

county-wide hand recount mandated by state law. "

 

Yet despite all this manpower and money power, exit polls showed that

Kerry would win Ohio. So, what happened?

 

I have told more than enough of this mystery story so thoroughly

investigated by Conyers and his Congressional colleagues and their

staffers. Not only were the crimes against democracy investigated but

the report on What Went Wrong in Ohio comes up with quite a number of

ways to set things right.

 

Needless to say, this report was ignored when the Electoral College

produced its unexamined tally of the votes state by state. Needless to

say, no joint committee of the two houses of Congress was convened to

consider the various crimes committed and to find ways and means to

avoid their repetition in 2008, should we be allowed to hold an

election once we have unilaterally, yet again, engaged in a war --

this time with Iran. Anyway, thanks to Conyers, the writing is now

high up there on the wall for us all to see clearly: " Mene, mene,

tekel, upharsin. " Students of the Good Book will know what these words

of God meant to Belshazzar and his cronies in old Babylon.

 

Gore Vidal is a contributing editor to The Nation, and a novelist,

playwright and essayist. His recent books include Dreaming War: Blood

for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta and Imperial America, out in

paperback this September (Thunder's Mouth/Nation Books).