OKAY, THE GOP FIXED IT IN '04, TOO
GORE VIDAL: Something Rotten in Ohio

Gore Vidal may be an elitist, but, damn it, he's our elitist, and he's in fine form with this biting essay on how, once again, we're having to face up to the fact that Bush stole this last election, too. From the Nation:

Asked to predict who would win in '04, I said that, again, Bush would lose, but I was confident that in the four years between 2000 and 2004 creative propaganda and the fixing of election officials might very well be so perfected as to insure an official victory for Mr. Bush. As Representative Conyers's report, Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio (www.house.gov/conyers), shows in great detail, the swing state of Ohio was carefully set up to deliver an apparent victory for Bush even though Kerry appears to have been the popular winner as well as the valedictorian-that-never-was of the Electoral College.

And

It is well-known in the United States of Amnesia that not only did Ohio have a considerable number of first-time voters but that Blackwell and his gang, through "the misallocation of voting machines led to unprecedented long lines that disenfranchised scores, if not hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters."

For the past few years many of us have been warning about the electronic voting machines, first publicized on the Internet by investigator Bev Harris, for which she was much reviled by the officers of such companies as Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S, Triad; this last voting computer company "has essentially admitted that it engaged in a course of behavior during the recount in numerous counties to provide 'cheat sheets' to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets informed election officials how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand recount mandated by state law."

Click here for the rest.

At some point in the second half of the 90s, I came to the conclusion that corporate cash and big media shaping of issues and national narrative had become so rampant that democracy no longer has any real meaning in the United States: representatives and senators no longer represent citizens, and citizens, for the most part, no longer have any realistic notions about what's actually happening in the world. We go through the motions of democracy, but it's all just a show. The real power is in money, not voting.

As if that wasn't good enough for the plutocracy.

Even though it's pretty clear by now that the Florida Presidential election was rigged in Bush's favor in 2000, I was still pretty skeptical about it happening again in 2004. After all, this sort of issue plays strongly into the hands of conspiracy-minded individuals, and I had already written off American democracy, anyway, so why worry about it? But the evidence has been piling up, thanks to Conyers' magnificent efforts: I feel like I now have enough compelling information to jump on the election-rigging '04 bandwagon.

It's the massively long lines in African-American precincts that swayed me. This is similar to what happened in Florida. Republican state election officials in both Florida and Ohio targeted the voting rights of black people, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat: this seems to be quickly becoming the GOP modus operandi for election fixing. In Florida, it was a bogus list of disenfranchised felons; in Ohio, it was purposely leaving black precincts with too few voting machines, resulting in huge numbers of African-Americans not being allowed to vote. Both approaches were extremely effective--both approaches are racist, too, I might add.

As usual, Congress, almost all of Congress, deep in the pockets of corporations and the super wealthy, ignored what happened in Ohio, just like with Florida four years ago. As usual, the corporate owned news media, reflecting the desires and views of their masters, also ignored the racist election fraud in Ohio, just like with Florida four years ago.

So, even though American democracy is simply a show, that show has become extraordinarily insincere. It's like going to see a production of Oh! Calcutta!, but the actors are all wearing flesh-colored body suits. You know it's not real life, just a show, but you wanted to see some full-frontal nudity, damn it! Alas, it's only fake nudity that you get to see, and the tickets cost just too damned much for that.

Oh! America!

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