As Pogo the Possum said, “We have met the enemy, and [s]he is us.”
May 4th, 2008
Any rational person who isn’t blinded by ideology would have to acknowledge that, while claiming to “protect” us from totalitarian evil, the Bush administration has, in fact, become totalitarian evil. Why would anyone consider that a good thing? Totalitarianism is totalitarianism, and evil is evil.
A part of the Rove/Cheney/Bush strategy for accomplishing that has been the subversion of America’s voting process. The dirty tricks are as numerous as they are disgusting. Hack the voting machines in Florida and elsewhere. Use “push polling” to deceive voters (think South Carolina when McCain got “Roved.”). Make sure that Republican districts have lots of voting machines, while Democratic districts have so few as to ensure that voters would have to wait many hours to vote (think Ohio in 2004). Pass “voter ID” legislation to ensure that comfortably well-off voters will be allowed to vote, while economically and especially Black, voters will be turned away at the voting points. [Think Indiana, and the Neo-Con SCOTUS. There has never been a documented case of false ID in Indiana’s history. But the legislature there passed a law requiring IDs that all well-off voters (many of whom are likely to vote Republican), and many not-so-well-off voters (many of them Black and almost all likely to vote Democratic), will have difficulty obtaining.
OK. On and on and on. The point is that Republicans have for decades been conducting a coordinated campaign to subvert the democratic process…all the while claiming hypocritically to believe in honesty, freedom, and democracy.
Look. This present set of strategies and techniques started among College Republicans (including Karl Rove and the incarcerated Jack Abramoff), while they were subverting campus elections. According to convicted Watergate conspirator Donald Segreti, they called it “rat fucking.” [I consider that fair justification for calling these conspirators “fuckers”! They themselves coined the phrase. In other words, to be “Roved” means to be fucked.]
Right now the Clinton campaign is reading from the Neo-Con manual for denying the true spirit and meaning of democracy. I defy anyone to compare recent comments (like “obliterate Iran”) and campaign strategy (”guilt by association,” Joseph McCarthy all over again) and detect a difference.
This is disgusting, contemptible, and scary. If it works, we will have denied the spirit of fairness and democracy in our primary election process and will have nominated a cynic who values winning far more than honesty, honor, and the spirit of democracy. Consequently, in the general election we will face a choice between Rove/Cheney/Shrub senile, and Rove/Cheney/Shrub female. Nice.
If we cannot tell the difference between you and our Neo-Con competitors, Senator Clinton, then why should we bother to vote? You’re offering us the prospect of a choice between, not the lesser or greater of two evils, but of a coin-toss between two equivalent evils.
Look! No one should claim to believe in the democratic system of government if she or he is unwilling to honor its spirit while campaigning. To do otherwise is either to demonstrate that the candidate thinks true democracy is too weak to play an effective role in our society and our world…or to demonstrate that the candidate is a cynical hypocrite.






