March 1, 2006
Blowing in the Wind
In comes March. Like a lion is an understatement. The rogue regime is creating more havoc on a daily basis than anyone could possibly keep up with. How could even they keep up with it? I think the only way anyone could live with it is by disassociation. The reality of the damage produced by the Bush regime is way too much for them to be cognizant of. I'm convinced they have no more than the most elemental, residual traces of conscience. But even so, the human misery they have caused would be enough to make anyone who had a heart explode. What blinders all these supporters of the regime have to wear! It's getting dangerous to even think at all lest one stumble over some piece of utter absurdity generated by the fantasy, or worse, get a glimpse of the monumental tragedy.How long will it take history to fully grasp the monstrosity of what these men have done? Do we even now understand Hitler? What causes a man to set forces in action that will cause millions of innocent people to be killed? Even now there are people who support Hitler. Plenty of them. And there are many many more who would reject the names and symbols of Nazism, but support actions of their own government that were deemed criminal by the world court when the Nazis committed them.
How much worse will it get before the will of the people rises to stop this criminal activity? Phrased another way: what does a democratic society do when its voting system is corrupted and it no longer can put people out of office with elections?
Let's phrase it as a hypothetical proposition, since most of the establishment is in utter denial of the fact that its electoral system is in the trash. If, hypothetically, a ruling party managed to undermine the voting system by a multi-pronged program that included rigging voting machines, purging legitimate voters off voter rolls, enabling friendly voting districts and denying equipment to districts that vote with the opposition, moving or closing polling places, enacting phony regulations to fool people into thinking they don't have the right to vote -- all of which have been practiced aggressively by the Republicans since 2000 -- then you could enact unpopular policies and never worry about an electoral backlash.
This is what has happened. The numbers, the polls before the election, since the election, the exit polls and basic arithmetic of the 2004 election make it absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt that the ruling party is not winning popular majorities at the polling places. Even with a high-power propaganda machine pumping its message, the Bush party could not win a majority to send it back to the White House for a second term. It rigged the election, and the polls since the phony election reflect how little actual support the regime really has. One year after Bush's alleged, much-hyped "mandate", he has poll numbers so abysmally low that they almost force the creation of a new kind of measuring paradigm for presidential approval.
If I didn't know better, I would try to believe that Bush won the election legitimately, but it would be very hard to believe. How could his poll numbers be so abysmally low only one year after he won the rare mandate of a second term in the White House? Come on! What happened in that time?
Oh sure, you say, they've completely blown everything they've tried since Bush won his much-touted "political capital" and declared that he was now going to spend it. It's true they've botched things no one ever imagined anyone botching before, but even if they had blown everything they wouldn't be this unpopular if the people had really been behind them in the first place, behind them enough to have returned them to office in 2004 after the horrible mess they had made of this poor, battered but unbowed country.
Historically the American people tolerate quite a bit in their presumed leaders. But the leaders who have risen to power have by and large had some small measure of respect for the constitutional traditions of the country, unlike these thugs. This country never elected Bush in the first place, has tolerated a tremendous amount of damage to the vast majority of the country in order to benefit a small international elite, and no -- I do not believe the American people willingly returned him to office under those circumstances.
On top of the sleazy way they gangstered the election of 2000, Bush proceeded to unmask the "compassionate conservative" character and unveil his true persona as a radical, power-grabbing lunatic who aggressively launched policies that violate the fundamental basis of law and the democratic, humanistic traditions on which the country was founded. He aggressively pursued an agenda that defied not only most of his campaign promises, but also flagrantly defied the will of the great majority of the country. America fell into a huge funk, except the small elite who were stratospherically rich yet still insatiable for more, and unconcerned what moral or economic price the people will have to pay for their exploits.
Even as uninspiring a candidate as John Kerry was, as unwilling to take a strong stand as he was and present a real alternative, the people deeply needed a change. And when and if all the voter fraud is sorted out by historians, it will be demonstrated clearly that Kerry did win a majority in Ohio, the final state to award Bush the presidency. Due to strange, statistically impossible shifts in the voting machine tallies, the election went to Bush, again.
It's been well established in official tests that the dominant voting machines now used by most of the voters could be used to massively shift numbers around from a central tallying room, applying "corrections" whenever the actual vote tallies conflicted with the desired overall result. It's easily possible if the owners and controllers of the machines wanted to do it. And there would be no way to catch them because their software (unlike Google's apparently) is proprietary and the corporations who own the patents, themselves owned by extreme right wing zealots, don't have to show them.
No, even as disastrous as Bush's performance has been since his reinstallment, it would not be bad enough to explain poll numbers like these. Today Bush was down to 34 approval rating, his lowest ever. And beloved Dick Cheney was down to 18%. (See International Herald Tribune)
You know that it ain't because the TV news is opposed to him, because it's been demonstrably supportive of the administration right down the line. Even with a massive ongoing propaganda campaign on TV, these guys cannot pull off the theater. They just ain't cutting it. When are the invisible masters behind the scenes going to cut the puppet strings? They must know they need a new act.
I really don't understand the widespread establishment refusal to even consider such issues as the well-established fact that the voting machines can be easily corrupted. And by the massive preponderence of evidence that it did in fact happen widely in election 2004. Why is that not an issue to be investigated, probed, discussed thoroughly in public forums?
I'm not talking about the pro and con of the issue, I'm referring to the mere admission of the question into the public dialogue. If the voting system is working perfectly, as the political and media establishment implicitly agree it is, fine. We all win. If that's the case, then an investigation of it will establish the fact. In an open forum, the better idea can prevail, theoretically. At least it has a chance. But to not even entertain the question, in the face of such widespread evidence. That's either criminally negligent, or or strangely out of touch with the urgency of the threat to democratic government.
Bush yaps so much about democracy, uses it as a justification for killing 100,000 Iraqis and destroying their country. And yet the political/media elite in America seem to have no concern about it at home.
But back to the present, the disasters of this moment, which are themselves engulfing, all-consuming, exhausting. Each week there are several of them. And the old disasters keep on happening. The Katrina disaster is ongoing. According to a newly-released report from the human rights organization Oxfam America, 2,000 people are still missing from the New Orleans flood. The 1,300 number of deaths only represented the number of bodies that were recovered. Let's see: add the 2,000 that are officially missing and that makes 3,300. More than 9/11. Not good PR. So chop it. Manipulate it. Juggle the numbers. Cover it up. It's always the same.
Amy Goodman on Democracy Now interviewed the head of Oxfam about the condition of New Orleans and the Gulf region. She asked him to summarize his findings. He said, "It reads like the Congo. Three quarters of a million people still displaced. The 300,000 homes that had been destroyed. I was there just a couple of weeks ago, you know, the rubble is still in the lots people are living in tents in the lots without food., and without water and without access to toilets. And with so much of the money getting poured into the direct relief efforts, i.e. putting people up in shelters and in hotels. And that deadline is hitting us. Where are people going to go?"
Now in a few more months, the next hurricane season is coming. People are still living in their yards in tents, without toilets, without electricity. Bush promised to do everything it would take to rebuild New Orleans. But it doesn't matter. It means nothing. As long as he said it for the cameras, the papers reported it. Who even cares what the truth is?
Now as everything collapses all around, as America descends into an abyss with no end in sight, as the economic foundation of the country is plundered into nothing, the social infrastructure is shattered and people are reduced to a third world-style struggle to survive, one has to ask the question: how long will Americans stand by and watch the unraveling? How long until they understand the degree to which the Bush administration is really destroying America? How long until they shake off their hypnotic TV stupor and rise up to end this nightmare?
(The definitive piece on the election irregularities of 2004, in my experience, is Mark Crispin Miller's Fooled Again, which I've been reading lately. Or see BlackBoxVoting.org).