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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kikogrey who wrote (1376)	11/14/2004 2:51:09 AM
From: SiouxPal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361293

Requiem for a Republic The stunning win by the Republicans in Tuesday's elections have left a lot of people reeling. Not only did Bush trump Kerry by some 4 million popular votes, but his party held on to and deepened its lead in Congress. On the face of it, it is a remarkable accomplishment. Perhaps it is too remarkable. This election overturns three of the most dependable nostrums in US presidential politics. One of these is that in this age of sound bite, instant analysis and impressionist news coverage, a failure to hold one’s own in the televised presidential debates is fatal to a candidate. Bush not only failed to hold his own, his performance was conceded even by supporters to be a disaster. From the polls, the debates might never have happened. Another electoral rule of thumb is that high turnouts favour the Democrats. Not this time. This is a stunning turnaround, implying that the Republicans really have become a populist party. The millions of white working class voters who deserted the Democratic Party for Ronald Reagan’s reworked Republican Party were one thing; but the truth is that they didn’t desert the Democratic Party, the Party deserted them. It seems a bit of a stretch to presume that this is the operative factor in this election. By all accounts, the Democrats’ voter registration drive broke all the records. The instant analysts’ explanation is that Karl Rove’s strategy of energising the President’s Christian fundamentalist base led to a record Republican turnout. This too strikes us a quite a stretch: The President’s approval ratings have remained remarkably consistent throughout his first term. After his surge in the wake of 911 they trended downward relentlessly to return to the abysmal lows reached just before the attacks in September 2001. And the truth is that for all the sound and fury surrounding the issue of Christian fundamentalism in American politics; it is a minority group with no coat tails. The Republicans’ success on Tuesday is all the more remarkable then for its being inexplicable without recourse to divine intervention. This leads us to the third and most important of our nostrums, the fact that exit polls over the years have proven in the United States to be remarkably accurate leading indicators of election results. The reason is fairly simple: as long as the electoral process is free of intimidation and fraud, what people say they did in the polling booth is likely to be true. This is why on Tuesday by 6PM Eastern time that it looked as though Kerry was going to be the victor in Florida and Ohio, never mind nationally. As the night wore on, however, count after count failed to match the exit polls. Some thirty percent of the national vote is tallied by computer. These computer tallies are not audited, indeed, it is our understanding that they are cannot be audited. Could this be the source of the problem? It may well be. One simple way of finding out would be to compare exit polls with the official count and then look at the divergence between them compared to the use of computer counting and electronic voting. If, as we suspect, manual counts tally with the exit polls and electronic counts do not, then that would be, I put it to you, prima facie evidence of fraud. Early indications that his may indeed be the case have been posted at www.democraticunderground,.com, and another organisation, Black Box Voting Inc. (www.blackboxvoting.org) is blanketing the US with Freedom of Information Act requests for voting records and data. The Kerry campaign’s decision to concede before all the results were in is no surprise. We have said all along that the main point of the Kerry candidacy was to ensure that the liberal democratic majority remained under control. The Establishment wants no challenge to its war; to the end Kerry refused to fundamentally challenge the Bush administration’s foreign policy. This is the sort of job that Kerry has done brilliantly throughout his career from the BCCI and Iran contra cover-ups to this election. I must confess admiration for his extemporaneous concession speech in Boston. He is a political professional through and through. The problem is that neither he nor the Democratic Leadership Council represents the people who belong to the Democratic Party. By contrast, Bush’s acceptance speech in Washington was stilted and wooden, the President looking and speaking as though he was drugged. Introduced by Dick Cheney and guided by his wife, he read his short speech from a teleprompter to wild and oddly timed applause. Cheney, by contrast, spoke well and looked and sounded, as he usually does, the chief executive that he is. The contrast between the two men was remarkable, and revealed who really runs this administration. And therein lies the rub, because this election is no mandate, although the Republicans have lost no time in calling it one. The War on Terror is one thing, but there is another war being waged that may well determine the outcome of the first, and that is the covert civil war within the American establishment. This is not based on a division along party lines as the large number of senior Republicans who endorsed Kerry proves. Nor is it a disagreement about empire. It is, rather, a difference of world view and even temperament, and it is being heated to a boil by the rapidly narrowing options open to America. With the public and foreign debt spiralling out of control, and the military stretched thin and taking casualties while the war profiteers take profits, the abyss between those who would engage with the world and those who would conquer it has never been wider. This election was a collaborative effort between them to keep the lid on the electorate lest it explode in their faces, but the risk this entails is that it explodes anyway, and all the more forcefully. To the serial investigations of Halliburton, the Valerie Plame investigation, the anthrax attack investigation and the Israeli espionage investigations underway, our bet is that we will soon be adding an investigation into the biggest vote fraud in history. For an epitaph for Election 2004 I turn to the late, great Walter Karp: “The cynics as usual were not cynical enough.” Chris Sanders csanders@sandersresearch.com Thank you tooearly Sioux