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Loot the Vote:
The Bush Faction's Future Victories are Already in the Bag
By Chris Floyd
01/19/06 "Empire
Burlesque" -- -- Things are looking a bit grim for the Bush
Faction these days. Their chief bagman, Jack Abramoff, is in the
clink, naming names. Their top congressional enforcer, Tom
Delay, is in the dock, sinking fast. Their "war of choice" in
Iraq has stalled in murderous quagmire. Their poll numbers are
plummeting , as scandal after scandal -- corruption, despotism,
torture, incompetence, deceit -- turn the American people
against them. What then will be the fate of these brutal,
bungling, bloodstained goons when they face the voters in the
coming elections?
Why, victory, of course!
In fact, this year's congressional races and the presidential
contest in 2008 are already over, and the Bushists have won.
It's true that some of the candidates have not yet been chosen –
including whatever front man the goon squad picks to replace the
kill-crazy klutz from Crawford – but the vast machinery of
electoral malfeasance that propelled this extremist faction to
power over the wishes of the electorate in both 2000 and, yes,
2004, is not only still in place, it's growing stronger all the
time.
No one has laid bare the malodorous innards of this
democracy-devouring monster better than Mark Crispin Miller,
whose new book,
Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why
They'll Steal the Next One Too, takes us back
to the dastardy of Election Day 2004 and the hydra-headed
campaign of vote-rigging that preceded it. This second heist of
the White House is one of the great untold stories of our time –
even though it was largely carried out in plain sight. Miller
performs the simple but increasingly rare act of journalism and
gathers a mountain of overwhelming evidence from publicly
available material. This is no "conspiracy theory" stitched
together from anonymous sources, strained inferences and dark
innuendo, but a solid case based on official records, sworn
testimony, eyewitness accounts, news reports – and the Bushists'
own words.
Indeed, the game was actually given away long before the
balloting, when one of the Faction's congressional waterboys,
Representative Peter King, was captured – on film – boasting
that the fix was in. At a White House chow-down in summer 2003,
King was asked who he thought would win in 2004. "It's already
over," King said. "The election's over. We won…It's all over but
the counting. And we'll take care of the counting."
Indeed they did. As often noted here, tens of millions of votes
are now counted using paperless, easily-hackable electronic
voting machines programmed – and often administered – by a
handful of corporations whose officers are unabashed Bush
backers. Two of these, the notorious Diebold and lesser-known,
equally shadowy ES&S, were kickstarted by right-wing tycoon
Harold Ahmanson, once the major backer of the "Christian
Reconstruction" movement – which advocates total theocratic rule
of state and society by Christian mullahs, with death for
homosexuals, disenfranchisement for unbelievers, and slavery for
debtors, among other delights. [See
Vanishing Act: Disappearing the Republic at the Touch of a
Button and
Pin Heads: The New Bush Push for Theocracy.]
With these corporations at the helm, the 2004 vote was the most
shambolic in American history, plagued by an epidemic of machine
breakdowns and shortages (almost entirely in key Democratic
precincts), and by a rash of "glitches" that "inexplicably"
switched the voter's intended choice to a different candidate,
or added hundreds or even thousands of "ghost" votes to a
candidate's total. In every single recorded case of such
"accidents," the beneficiary of these unearned votes was George
W. Bush. Meanwhile, as in 2000, strange voting patterns emerged
in pockets across the country, where unknown fringe candidates
unaccountably received thousands of votes – at the expense of
the Democratic candidate.
Of course, gaming the electronic voting grid was only part of
the operation. Voter suppression techniques first unlimbered in
2000 were polished to a high sheen in 2004 – including purges of
deliberately misidentified "felons" from the rolls; mass
intimidation campaigns in poverty-ridden districts (e.g.,
"official" notices that anyone owing back rent, child support,
unpaid traffic tickets, etc. would be arrested if they tried to
vote); reducing the number of polling stations in
Democratic-leaning precincts and stocking them with old,
derelict machines; and a sophisticated, nationwide scam of
deceitfully "registering" Democratic voters – who then
discovered they were not on the books when they showed up to
vote. The Republican National Committee paid millions to the man
behind this flim-flam, the theocrat and Bush insider, Nathan
Sproul.
The 2004 vote also saw the repetition of the exit poll debacles
of 2002 and 2000, with the final results in each case defying
the poll data to a remarkable degree. For decades, exit polls
have proven so consistently reliable that they are used by many
institutions – including the U.S. State Department – to gauge
the fairness of elections around the world. Yet only in the
United States – and only in the last three elections involving
the Bush Faction – have they have failed utterly to jibe with
the always "surprising" official tally.
This overview only scratches the surface of Miller's mountain of
damning facts. But the book also includes insightful analysis to
help us understand just how this gaggle of militarists,
millenarists and money-grubbers have managed to seize – and keep
– power in a decayed, sclerotic Republic whose institutions have
proven too weak to withstand the gang's fanaticism – and too
corrupt to resist the bribery, "legal" and otherwise, that the
Bushists dole out from public and private coffers.
Despite the scandals, the indictments, the mounting death count
in Iraq, and the ever-deepening unpopularity of Bush and his
minions, the Faction's tools for "manufacturing consent" – so
ably exposed by Miller – are greased and ready, unchallenged by
the clueless, spineless Democrats and the dollar-dazzled media.
So look for more "astonishing upsets" and poll-confounding
"surprises" in the coming national elections, as brute power
rapes reality once again
Copyright Chris Floyd
http://chris-floyd.com/
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