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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SiouxPal who wrote (61820)	10/20/2004 10:16:26 AM
From: abuelita	Respond to of 89467

g'morning sioux American democracy? A hollow platitude Stephen Hume Vancouver Sun Wednesday, October 20, 2004 As the Americans move toward the finale of their presidential race, the process looks less like an election in a progressive nation and more like a political brawl in some ethically challenged Third World backwater. For a nation that spouts high-minded rhetoric about leading the unenlightened towards democracy, this campaign seems rife with contempt for democracy's basic principles -- which are that the political debate should be on the issues and that as many citizens as possible should vote. Instead, we have incumbent George W. Bush implying that a vote for challenger John Kerry would amount to an invitation to the international terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center to come back and do it again. In a mature democracy candidates peddling such mean-spirited nonsense would be jeered off the podium. Meanwhile, Reuters has quoted Mary Frances Berry, head of the US Commission on Human Rights as saying: "There are individuals and officials who are actively trying to stop people from voting who they think will vote against their party and that nearly always means stopping black people from voting. . ." Democracy American-style is apparently not about getting out the vote for your candidate, it's about seeing how many of those who might vote for your opponents you can disenfranchise. Well, this is politics with a long and dirty pedigree, all right, but democracy it's not. In Ohio, according to a Cleveland Plain Dealer report, the same guy whose company was vying to provide computerized touch-screen voting machines -- controversial because they leave no paper record and are therefore thought vulnerable to tampering -- told a fund-raising dinner last year that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." In Nevada, according to reports in the New York Times and from a Las Vegas TV station, supervisors at a firm hired to register voters were accused of instructing employees to destroy voter registration forms for one party but to process registration forms for the other. Similar allegations have occurred in Oregon and West Virginia. In Florida, where the Republican governor is the president's brother, those running the electoral machinery were accused during the last presidential election of systematically disenfranchising tens of thousands of blacks who traditionally vote Democrat. Now the same mess seems to be boiling up again. This time according to the New York Times, Florida's state secretary ruled that voter registrations would be cancelled as incomplete if those registering failed to check off a box affirming citizenship -- even if they had signed an oath elsewhere on the same form swearing they were citizens. And we've got TV network bosses with ties to the ruling Republican party ordering affiliated stations to air a film that is reported (I confess I haven't seen it) to be a partisan hatchet-job on Kerry -- an "attackumentary," was the term coined to describe it by some writers. At the same time we've got TV network bosses refusing to air Michael Moore's award-winning and amusing but nonetheless controversial hatchet-job on Bush for reasons that aren't exactly clear. What was clear was the message delivered by the TV network planning to air the attack on Kerry. It reportedly fired its Washington bureau chief for telling a newspaper reporter that he wasn't happy with politics driving the network news agenda. In Texas, when a weekly paper presumed to endorse Kerry because of Bush's handling of the domestic economy and fears that -- as George Bush Sr. succinctly explained of his decision not to chase Saddam Hussein to Baghdad the first time around -- there's no viable exit strategy from Iraq, half the readers cancelled their subscriptions following a partisan local campaign. For some, I guess, there's nothing quite so comforting as pre-digested opinions with which they already agree. Heaven forbid that their day should be troubled by anything so unpleasant as a different point of view. In the meantime, perhaps our American friends will just put a sock in all those sanctimonious sermons about democracy. They have a bit of fixing-up to do with their own.