News of the Month

November 6, 2004

The biggest news of the past month is, of course, last Tuesday’s the elections. But before we talk about that, let’s look at some of the things that happened over the past month leading up to those elections.

First, let’s look at just a sampling of the illegal stunts the Republicans pulled to ensure their continued hold on power. If you read this commentary on my web site, as I mentioned earlier, in it you’ll find links to details about these “dirty tricks.”

The Albuquerque, New Mexico, Journal reported that one woman “… went to Valle Del Norte Community Center in Albuquerque, planning to vote for John Kerry. ‘I pushed his name, but a green check mark appeared before President Bush's name,’ she said.”
http://abqjournal.com/elex/246845elex10-22-04.htm

In Florida (no surprise), the St. Petersburg Times reported that partisan reps were going to people’s houses and collecting their absentee ballots, saying (untruthfully) that they were on the county election office staff.
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/10/22/Pasco/Election_chief_warns_.shtml

Pennsylvania’s Philly.com reported that attempts were made to move polling places away from predominately minority areas:
http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/news/local/9973706.htm?1c

And in Pittsburgh, the Post-Gazette reported “… accusations that workers were … given instructions to avoid adding anyone to the voter rolls who might support the Democratic presidential nominee.”
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04294/398767.stm

In Ohio, the Columbus Dispatch reported “two scams: The caller tells voters their precincts have changed; or the caller offers to pick up an absentee-ballot application, deliver the ballot to the voter and return the completed ballot to the elections office.”
http://www.dispatch.com/election/election-local.php?story=dispatch/2004/10/22/20041022-A1-00.html

The San Jose Mercury-News reported that “In several battleground states across the country, a consulting firm funded by the Republican National Committee has been accused of deceiving would-be voters and destroying Democratic voter registration cards. Arizona-based Sproul & Associates is under investigation in Oregon and Nevada over claims that canvassers hired by the company were instructed to register only Republicans and to get rid of registration forms completed by Democrats.”
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/9989544.htm?1c

In Pennsylvania, Republican House Speaker and Bush-Cheney ’04 State Regional Campaign Chair John Perzel acknowledged his job is to suppress the largely minority Philadelphia vote. “The Kerry campaign needs to come out with humongous numbers here in Philadelphia,” Perzel told U.S. News & World Report. “It’s important for me to keep that number down.”

I’ve included links in this script on my web site to several articles on the election that I don’t have time to read here. Go to the web site, www.tom-davis.org, and look in tonight’s News of the Month for hyperlinks to these articles. Reporter Greg Palast has two articles on some of the vote frauds perpetrated on the American people. First is an article with details of how the Republicans “suppressed” the minority vote in Colorado, Ohio, Florida, and New Mexico – all critical “swing” states. Second is an article that shows, in hard numbers, that once again, Bush lost the election, but had his … irons pulled out of the fire by friendly state officials and court judges. Finally, a press release by the Institute for Public Accuracy details six specific instances of vote fraud in Ohio alone.

Are we surprised? Of course not – that’s the way the politics of money, power, and influence works. The Republicans are particularly offensive this year; but the Democrats have had their day, too – sometime, read about how Lyndon Johnson won his first political race.

For Texas abuse of money, power, and privilege this year, we have to look no further than Tom DeLay, the former professional bug killer from Sugarland. As you probably know by now, Mr. DeLay won his bid for re-election to the US House, and therefore to the post of House Majority Leader, last Tuesday. Money and power win out again. But money and power notwithstanding, there’s never been any question of his involvement in corruption and deceit, at the state and national levels. On October 21, the Austin American-Statesman reported that he had been subpoenaed to testify in one of the many corruption trials surrounding him:

”The subpoena was delivered Wednesday to the Texas Republican's attorneys in Houston after a failed attempt to serve him personally, said Lon Burnam, the Democratic state lawmaker from Fort Worth who filed the lawsuit. The subpoena calls for DeLay to give a deposition Monday (October 25).

“… Burnam said there is a ‘litany of questions with regard to misuse of public funds’ to pursue Democratic members of the Texas House who fled to Ardmore, Okla., and DeLay's role in searching for them.”

Of course, DeLay himself had too much money, power, and influence to have been caught in the net that collected nearly every one of his associates in the corrupt practices he’s been pursuing over the past several years. What do you expect? He’s a Republocrat.

You probably also heard that on October 18 the US Supreme Court voted to remand the redistricting of Texas’s representation in the US House back to the lower court that gave it the OK. In an article in Newsday, Suzanne Gamboa reported (before the election, remember) that:

“The Supreme Court … ordered a lower court to reconsider a Texas congressional map that could give Republicans six more seats in Congress in upcoming elections and help the GOP protect its majority. … The announcement is a victory for Democrats, but will not affect next month’s elections.”

Talk about good timing! They waited just long enough that, although they look like they’re interesting in upholding the law, in fact their decision had no effect at all on the election. As predicted, it did increase the number of Texas Republicans in the US House, but only by 5 of the possible 6 seats, giving them 21 of Texas’ 32 total seats.

The presidential election. The London Daily Mirror said it best, with their November 4 cover.

As it says, the American people have spoken; but what they said is really “Aaaahhhhh!” Fear reigns supreme. The central fact of this year’s election is that more voters seem to have bought the Bush cabal’s lies than saw through them. CheneyBushCorp had three major tactics in the campaign, one overt and two “stealth.” (None of them, by the way, had anything to do with the truth.) The overt push, of course, was to scare people as thoroughly as possible with that old bugaboo, terrorism. “Elect Kerry,” Cheney said, “and the terrorists will destroy America.” “Americans are safer,” Bush said. But when push came to shove, Bush himself said of Bin Laden, “I’m really not all that concerned about him.”

The first covert tactic was, plain and simple, vote fraud. We all expected it, and sure enough, it happened. Anyone who has done any research at all into unverifiable electronic voting has come to the inescapable conclusion that electronic voting can be used – and has been used in several elections, including this one – to fraudulently mis-record the votes that are cast. Here’s a very interesting graphic that shows the differences, in several states, between the exit polls and the votes recorded by paper and electronic means. Fascinating – in states that used paper ballots, the differences are negligible, well within the margin of error for polls like that. But for states that used electronic voting, it’s a whole different matter – the votes recorded for Bush are wildly disproportionate to the votes people said they’d cast. As I said, vote fraud. As in 2000, that alone would have been enough to give the … “victory” to Bush.

But it was the other covert tactic that caught everyone by surprise. A lot of so-called “Christian” churches – really the radical fundamentalist wing of the Christian Church – did a very effective job of getting their people out to vote. Exit polls showed that overwhelmingly, people who voted for Bush nationwide cited terrorism, women’s right to choose what happens to their own bodies, and rights of gay people to marry, as the “evils” that they trusted Bush to battle for them – by going to war against Iraq (which even the Bush junta now admits had nothing to do with 9/11). In other words, these radical fundamentalist pseudo-Christians believe that “morality” has no meaning other than in the area of sex, but that murdering innocent Iraqi civilians is perfectly OK.

Of course, all that “vote suppression” that the Republicans committed can’t have hurt, either. Post-election reports are beginning to come in – like registered Republicans in Seminole County, Florida, being given two ballots to fill out and deposit, or the total mess in Ohio. In that state, Bob Fitrakis, an attorney who monitored the election with the Election Protection Coalition, said, “There were far fewer machines in the inner-city districts than in the suburbs. I documented at least a dozen people leaving because the lines were so long in African-American areas. (Ohio Republican Secretary of State Kenneth) Blackwell did a great deal of suppressing before the election – like attempting to refuse to process voter registration forms. The absentee ballots were misleading in Franklin County. Kerry was the third line down, but you had to punch number four to vote for him. Bush was getting both his votes as well as Kerry's.”

You may or may not have heard, but Total Film Magazine reported last month that George W. Bush topped a poll of almost 10,000 people in Britain – as this year’s top screen villain. Bush won the dubious accolade for his unauthorized appearance in Michael Moore's documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11.” He beat out Doc Ock, played by Alfred Molina in “Spider-Man 2,” Leatherface in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Andy Serkis’ Gollum from the “Lord Of The Rings” trilogy, and Elle Driver, the assassin played by Daryl Hannah in “Kill Bill.”

And what about Kerry? Again, just as in 2000, the Democratic nominee put on a good show of waging a campaign, but in reality his message was only loosely coherent, and about as “hard-hitting” as a butterfly wing. Did you once hear him talk about the people – civilian and military, US and Iraqi – who have died, and are continuing to die, in Oil War II? Did you hear him talk about Bush’s dismal record on nearly anything you can name, from protecting the environment to tracking down Bin Laden? Did you hear him, even once, talk about the crimes perpetrated by Bush and his cohorts (like lying to Congress to gain approval for his war of aggression) or their ripping the Constitution to shreds?

Do you remember, back in the spring, when Kerry came out of “nowhere” to pull past Dean for the nomination, after the corporate media, in near-perfect synchronization, declared that Dean’s enthusiastic “Yeaahhh!” meant he was out of the race? I think what happened is the powers that be got scared that if Dean were nominated, he might actually run an effective campaign against Bush, and maybe even win the Presidency. “We can’t have that,” I can just hear them saying; “We’ve already had to kill one potential candidate (Paul Wellstone); two that close together might look a tad suspicious.” So they manipulated the media to discredit Dean and push Kerry, another rich son of privilege just like Bush – one who knew his bread was buttered on the losing side.

Of course, in all this, as Donovan sang during the Vietnam obscenity, “The war drags on.” In reporting the loss by American forces of nearly 400 tons of explosive munitions from an ammunition dump in Iraq, the American-Statesman quoted the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control that:

“This is not just any old warehouse in Iraq that happened to have explosives in it; this was a leading location for developing nuclear weapons before the first Gulf War. … It would be like invading the US in order to get rid of (weapons of mass destruction) and not securing Los Alamos or (Lawrence) Livermore (National Laboratory).”

I don’t know how many of you remember Vietnam; but this war is getting more and more like it– but with two important exceptions:

1. The government learned that if they let reporters get too close to the war crimes – excuse me: the action – the people are going to find out just what kind of criminal acts are being perpetrated in their names, day in and day out. Look what happened when one reporter for the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh, learned about a little out-of-the-way prison called Abu Ghraib. We are never going to see what’s really going on over there. The American people may have wool pulled firmly over their eyes (look how many votes W got last Tuesday), but our hearts are still in the right place; we’d never stand for it.

2. Our rulers have also learned that the underage, ill-trained, ill-equipped, and unwilling youth who have been tricked into enlisting in the reserves, only to be sent over to Iraq – and then had their terms extended without their agreement – don’t like it! So, in the style of a true “small-government” Republocrat, the Bush junta has hired mercenaries. Not just any mercenaries, of course, but mercenaries from our Veep’s own corporation, Halliburton. Gather ye profits where ye may.

Seymour Hersh, the Atlantic reporter who opened that can of … vipers at Abu Ghraib, said in a recent speech at U-Cal Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism that:

“The Iraq war is not winnable; a secret U.S. military unit has been “disappearing” people since December 2001; and America has no idea how irreparably its torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison has damaged its image in the Middle East. …

“While Hersh blamed the White House and the Pentagon for the Iraq quagmire and America’s besmirched world image, he was stymied by how it all happened. ‘How could eight or nine neoconservatives come and take charge of this government?’ he asked. ‘They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military! So you say to yourself, how fragile is this democracy?’ “

How fragile, indeed? And what do you think this “democracy” is going to look like in 4 years, after we’ve gone to war with Iran and god knows who else? I shudder to think of it.