Robert Perry: Bush v. Gore's Dark American Decade ("...Down A Very Dark Road")

[Hissyspit]

ttp://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/58-58/4244-bush-v-gores-dark-american-decade

Bush v. Gore's Dark American Decade

By Robert Parry
December 12, 2010

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Everyone immediately understood what the five partisan Republicans – William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy – had done: they had awarded the presidency to George W. Bush.

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By virtually all objective measures, the consequences of Bush’s eight-year presidency were disastrous, including massive federal deficits, an economy ravaged by reckless gambling on Wall Street, and two costly wars still hemorrhaging money and blood.

However, after two years of President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress undertaking emergency (and often unpopular) steps to stabilize the collapsing economy, the Republicans pounded a campaign drum of fiscal responsibility and deficit reduction, deriding Obama’s modest stimulus efforts and health-care reform as costly failures.

In their comeback, the Republicans also were aided by another Supreme Court ruling in early 2010, the Citizens United case, in which two right-wing appointees of President Bush – John Roberts and Samuel Alito – joined with Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy to strike down restrictions on corporate spending for political ads.

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Justice Scalia made clear that the purpose of the court’s action was to prevent Bush from falling behind in the tally and thus raising questions about his legitimacy should the Supreme Court later declare him the winner. That outcome would “cast a cloud” over the “legitimacy” of an eventual Bush presidency, explained Scalia. “Count first, and rule upon the legality afterwards, is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires,” Scalia wrote.

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A decade after the fateful court ruling – with the results of Bush’s presidency now painfully apparent and his own appointed justices helping to open the floodgates of special-interest money to further distort the democratic process – Bush v. Gore must be viewed as a moment when the United States started down a very dark road.

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[AndyTiedye]

1. Kicked onto the "Greatest" Page

:kick:

[Hissyspit]

7. And the correct link - definitely read the whole thing, everyone:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/121210.html

[Hissyspit]

11. I spelled Parry's name wrong, too.

Probably should go to bed.

[Peggy Day]

2. Started down a very dark road indeed.

I've never really respected the SCOUS after that, and it seems like my instincts were correct, sadly.

[Supersedeas]

20. judicial interference in politics is never a good recipe

[stellanoir]

3. thanks

but would you like to buy an "h" for that link. . .?

k&r

[Mist]

4. Here's the article's link:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/121210.html

[Zoeisright]

5. That was really the end of this country. We are not going to recover from that debacle.

And those five asshole justices will hopefully be blamed if history books are written accurately.

[EFerrari]

6. Not to mention the Senate Democrats who refused to stand up

with the Congressional Black Caucus in protest.

"On January 6, 2001, a joint session of Congress met to certify the electoral vote. Twenty members of the House of Representatives, most of them Democratic members of the Congressional Black Caucus, rose one-by-one to file objections to the electoral votes of Florida. However, according to an 1877 law, any such objection had to be sponsored by both a representative and a senator. No senator would co-sponsor these objections, deferring to the Supreme Court's ruling. Therefore, Gore, who presided in his capacity as President of the Senate, ruled each of these objections out of order."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2000

Not one.

That was the day we should have known our elections don't belong to us any more.

[Le Taz Hot]

10. Thank you for reminding DUers of

the Congressional Black Caucuses actions and how NOT ONE FUCKING SENATOR, even Barbara Boxer, would take this up because the PARTY BOSSES ordered them to stand down. And after what they did to Howard Dean in 2004, is anyone beginning to see now why I'm NOT a Democrat anymore?

[Peace Patriot]

8. That "very dark road" has been capped by the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines--

with the code owned and controlled now largely (80%) by one, private, far-rightwing connected corporation--ES&S, which just bought out Diebold--with virtually no audit/recount controls. The last state holdout, New York, just caved. The system is now complete. It is 99% to 100% non-transparent. 'We the People" have no right to review the code by which our votes are tabulated. Half the states do no audit at all--hand-count of ballots against machine totals--because they have no ballot at all. The other half do a miserably inadequate 1% audit. All this makes controlling election results not just easy, but REALLY REALLY easy.

So they won't need the Supreme Court any more, to crown an idiot king. They don't even need to suppress the black vote. A few keystrokes in ES&S's tech basement and anything can be made to happen, including the completely mindboggling, completely non-credible 'return' to power of the very fascist operatives who just totally fucked us over for the last decade.

Yeah, the money and media are BIG problems. No question about it. But they are problems no. 2 and no. 3. The biggest problem is that we have lost control of the very counting of our votes. That is problem no. 1. And until we DO something about it, we do not really have a democracy any more.

Voting and the counting of our votes are very nearly synonymous with our sovereignty as a people. By these acts we transfer some of our sovereignty temporarily to elected leaders, to act in our interest. There is no longer a single elected official in this country who can prove that we did that. Not one! It's all now run by ES&S/Diebold and a few other corporations, with complete or near-complete non-transparency. Where do our public officials derive their power from, if they cannot SHOW US the vote count?

When ES&S 'disappeared' 18,000 Democratic votes in FLA-13, in 2006, the Democrat, Christine Jennings, took the matter to court, and asked to review the 'TRADE SECRET' code, to determine what had become of those 18,000 votes. ES&S refused, and argued that their 'right' to profit from our elections trumps the right of the voters to know how their votes were counted. The judge sided with ES&S. Jennings then took the matter to the Congress--the final arbiter of congressional election disputes--now run by Democrats. They buried the matter six feet deep.

And that was that.

Gone!

Restoring transparent vote counting is not going to be easy, but it IS doable. Choice of voting systems still resides at the state/local level, where ordinary people still have potential influence. There is NO federal law mandating 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting. It was all done by corruption and filthy lobbying, funded by a $3.9 billion e-voting boondoggle from the Anthrax Congress (in the same month--the same month!--as the Iraq War Resolution).

We've got to get over that our own party leadership betrayed us, and continues to betray us every day that they don't fix this--which they never will do. They are either numbskulls, scaredy-cats or collusive. It is the given condition now for achieving political power that they must toady to the far rightwing. We see this every day and we don't understand how they can do it. Must be the corpo-fascist media, we think.

Let me just tell you one thing about ES&S and you will understand. This corporation was initially funded by reclusive rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon foundation, which touts the death penalty for homosexuals!

Now do you understand? THAT is the mentality at ES&S, the corporation that is 'counting' most of our votes with 'TRADE SECRET' code!

One more thing: In Latin America, they have arguably far worse corpo-fascist media than we do here. Yet they have elected strongly independent leftist governments in Brazil, in Argentina, in Venezuela, in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Uruguay, in Paraguay, in Nicaragua, in El Salvador, in Guatemala--leaders and governments that are changing history, that are standing up for their people, that are materially improving their peoples' lives, and that are banding together for regional political and economic strength, and notably to resist interference by the multinational corporations and war profiteers who are running things here. How are they doing this? Through honest, transparent elections, where every vote is counted, which means that "the People"--the poor majority--have a chance. You can overcome any disadvantage with sufficient grass roots organization, if the votes are counted honestly.

It's NOT the media. It's the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines! That's the difference.

Yes, we got fucked by the Supreme Court once, but it would never have happened again if they had not started spreading the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, like a plague, all through the land, during the 2002 to 2004 period. This was the edge that the slaughterers of a hundred thousand innocent Iraqis, and the torturers of prisoners, and the thieves who stole our country in every way imaginable, needed in 2004, to create the illusion of 're-election.' The 'TRADE SECRET' system was not yet complete. They had to suppress the black vote as well. But the edge WAS the voting machines. Now the system is complete. They've managed to blame everything on a weak "liberal" interim president in their utterly loony narrative of our national political life. And we won't see any evidence in the next stolen election. No Supreme Court bullshit. No black voters purged from the voting rolls. Nada. Complete, invisible, far rightwing control of the vote count.

Like magic, they will 'win'--those who have destroyed this wonderful country. They already have, with this entirely magically produced Puke Congress. They may keep Obama in; they may toss him out--depending on unknowable corporate/war profiteer plans and intentions. It will not be up to us and we will be completely unable to verify what they do. That's the situation--unless we demand vote counting IN THE PUBLIC VIEW in every precinct, county and state in the union.

Black citizens of this country, in 1950s and early 1960s, faced lynchings, beatings, rapes, imprisonment and every kind of intimidation from the racist white establishment that controlled the county registrar's office and the polling places. Their courageous struggle for their right to vote occurred LOCALLY, in every county registrar's office and county courthouse. It had to. Our right to vote is locally based. The tabulation of our votes used to occur LOCALLY, near where we live. (It most often occurs now in "central tabulators" far from where we live--whether it's the tabulation of scanned ballots, or of e-voting blips on a screen.) And the method of counting is still a LOCAL decision. That is where this fight must occur. And that is where it should occur. We must hold our LOCAL officials accountable for their decision to sell away our right to vote for a shiny new machine or a trip to Hollywood for an ES&S-run 'conference.' (Yup, they had one of those at the Beverly Hilton in 2005.)

We must not let a corporation stand between us and the counting of our votes. They have no right to be there, obstructing our view of our own votes. We must make our officials SHOW US the count.

Hand-counted paper ballots--or OPEN SOURCE code electronics, owned by the public, with a substantial audit of hand-counted ballots. Those are the only two transparent options.

If the Latin Americans can establish honest elections, with their horrendous history of oppression--if black Americans could establish their right to vote, in the very midst of violent oppression--so can the rest of us newly disenfranchised people. It may be harder for many of us to realize what is happening, because most of us haven't felt the lash of tyranny and oppression. But that is its name. Disenfranchisement. It is no less brutal for being invisible. And no less real.

Do vote! Never, ever, ever give up on your right to vote. Never despair. But make them count it where you can see it. Only then will we get our country back.

[Fritz67]

16. Scalia is an assclown.

Justice Scalia made clear that the purpose of the court’s action was to prevent Bush from falling behind in the tally and thus raising questions about his legitimacy should the Supreme Court later declare him the winner. That outcome would “cast a cloud” over the “legitimacy” of an eventual Bush presidency, explained Scalia. “Count first, and rule upon the legality afterwards, is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires,” Scalia wrote.

Yeah. Because it's never "legitimate" to award the election to the guy with the most f***ing votes, is it?


EDIT: Remark intended for the OP. Oops. :blush:

[kath]

19. +1000. We do not have anything resembling free and fair elections in this country.

This country is a travesty.

Hand-counted ballots, counted openly AT THE PRECINCT with plenty of observers from all parties, is the way to go, supplemented with audits.

[pnorman]

9. Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, in Bush v.. Gore

.
.
.
Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

I respectfully dissent.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-949.ZD.html

[SpiralHawk]

12. Yes. America is the loser.

But this too shall pass.

[malaise]

13. I maintain that it may well have been

the darkest day for the dream of democracy in America.
They should have been impeached.

[travelingtypist]

14. More treason that goes unpunished.

A black day indeed. I remember it all too well.

[Solly Mack]

15. k/r

[Blue Owl]

17. The perils of not looking backwards

Remember Barack Obama, you're choosing to build your house on this foundation...

[L. Coyote]

18. REC & thanks for reposting this.

2010.12.12 - JUNTA DAY 10th Anniversary - Bush v. Gore's Dark American Decade
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9758760

[MilesColtrane]

21. Don't forget the deadliest terrorist attacks in U.S. history.

Bush and the Rehnquist 5 gave us those, too.

[Raster]

23. Maybe even more so than we will ever know.

[Raster]

22. It's called a "coup d' etat." It happened in the United States.

pResident George W. Bush* was the result. This country will feel the negative repercussions of Bush*/Cheney* for DECADES to come. Decades.