Bush's right wing coup: Where has the outrage gone?
Harold Hark
28 February 2003 Entry-level humans who comprise the Right have only a few goals in life. Apart from amassing profit at any cost, keeping the masses ignorant and poor, one of its prime objectives is to discourage people on the Left from voting. In Florida at the 2000 election, they succeeded dramatically. The worldwide media is chock-a-block with information and commentary about the fomenter of the upcoming war to end all civilisations, but nary a word about his illegitimacy. Why?
True, the 2000 American election is over and done with and, in the current political climate, quite irreversible. But that is no excuse to drop the ball, to refrain from inserting at least one line in every commentary to the effect that we are rushing headlong into chaos at the behest of a man who should not be president.
George W. Bush joins Robert Mugabe, Saddam Hussein and, to a lesser extent, John W. Howard (who merely lied to retain power) as rogues who participated in a coup to capture their respective governments.
Information on the intrigues surrounding the theft of Florida's electoral votes has been on the Internet for some time, but very little was ever published by mainstream media, apart from The Guardian in Britain.
With the release of the documentary film Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election, everyone can now see for themselves how the Republican Party systematically denied thousands of Florida voters their so-called democratic right to vote."What emerges is a disturbing picture of an election marred by suspicious irregularities, electoral injustices, and sinister voter purges in a state governed by the winning candidate's brother. George W. Bush stole the presidency of the United States...and got away with it."
Elaine Dutka, Los Angeles Times SBS showed the documentary last week here in Australia. In case you missed it, here's the gist from my hastily taken notes, with some observations thrown in:BACKGROUND
• George W. Bush's older brother Jeb first ran for governor in 1994. In a televised debate he was asked what he would do for Florida's black community. "Probably nothing" was his reply. He lost that election, but won in 1998 with only 10 per cent of blacks registered to vote. In office, he promptly put an end to affirmative action, a policy detested by the Right, and was met with massive protests. This resulted in a huge voter mobilisation by blacks, with some 65 per cent now registered. Yet on election day 2000, many of their names were purged from voter lists.
• Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the co-chair of the Bush for President campaign, initiated a Felon Purge List based on a law dating from the Confederacy, which prevents ex-offenders from voting in Florida. (No other state retains the law.) While Jeb Bush's government could not find $100,000 for voter education, it did spend $4 million hiring Data Base Technologies to search and falsely identify felons.
• Harris instructed DBT to use the loosest possible parameters. Actual matches of names were not required, nor were identical spellings. Most of those matched were not felons at all. Of the listed felons, 2883 ex-offenders who had moved to Florida from other states were illegally purged, with 15 per cent innocent of ever having committed a felony.
• George Bruder, the Vice-President of DBT later testified that he asked Harris to change the parameters, that there were too many false positives. He received a letter from Jeb Bush telling him to carry on as instructed.
• The documentary makers asked Jeb Bush for an interview. He refused. Katherine Harris did not even bother to respond to their request.
ELECTION DAY AND THE MONTH FOLLOWING
• As soon as the polls opened, police were on hand to harass and intimidate black voters. Voters were accused of loitering while in the voter queue, and many were required to show identification. Inside the polling booths, many found that, although they had registered, their names were not on the list.
• Al Gore won the nationwide popular vote by some 260,000 votes. A true democracy would go no further in determining victory, but that is not the way of lawmakers who are careful to weigh in favour of the vested interests of the most powerful party of the moment.
• Thus, the final result came down to Florida's 25 electoral votes. At the end of election day, Bush was ahead by only .03 per cent. Florida law requires that a margin this slim be subjected to an automatic machine recount of all stations, yet only a partial recount was begun. Bush continued to lose votes.
• Jeb Bush immediately swung into action. His legal counsel stepped down to work for the Bush campaign, as did all aides. Jeb instructed them that their job was to deliver the presidency to George.
• It turned out that 17,000 ballots were unread by machines. Faulty machines were found in Palm Beach County, some not cleaned of their chads since the 1998 election. There were confusing ballot designs in some counties; the arrow pointing to a Gore vote fell between two holes. Then there were the Caterpillar votes, with instructions to vote on every page. But those who did had their ballots rejected.
• In Duval County some 27,000 votes were thrown out, 16,000 in precincts who voted 98 per cent Democrat.
• The Democrats made a fatal error in requesting manual recounts in only four counties, believing that these held the key to victory. Their self-interest and fear that Bush would pick up votes if all counties were subjected to scrutiny cost them dearly. In the end, both Gore and Bush brushed aside what was in the public interest: that all votes be validated.
• Even though the then Governor of Texas, George W. Bush, had enacted the most liberal law in the country requiring hand recounts in close elections, he and his party now vehemently protested them in Florida.
• The Republicans launched protest campaigns to discredit the recounting standards. Republican congressional aides were flown in from Washington to stage phoney protests to disrupt proceedings. (And the Right always complains of rent-a-crowds!)
• The fiasco of the chads ensued. (Chads are those little confetti that drop out of a punched ballot.) Hanging chads are defined as still attached; Pregnant chads are bulging but not perforated; Dimpled chads show a barely discernible imprint. All came into play and, depending whose side you were on, were roundly jeered or sought after. And yet, common sense dictates that no one makes an indentation unintentionally. A mistake may be made but the indentation represents an attempt to vote. Furthermore, Florida law stipulates that a vote cannot be rejected where the vote is clear. Dimpled, Pregnant and Hanging Chads were clearly votes. The Republicans staged a relentless ridicule of the chad dilemma, in effect ridiculing voter intent, and most Americans responded. Florida voters were seen as idiots who were incapable of voting properly.
• The Republicans appealed to the Florida Federal Court (a conservative body), instead of the more liberal State Court, to have recounting stopped. Meanwhile, the Democrats appealed to the Florida Supreme Court to have the recounting deadline extended.
• Katherine Harris announced no further extension of the deadline for counting beyond November 17. A public servant in Palm Beach County vowed she would go to jail rather than stop counting.
• The time then came for absentee ballots to be counted. Florida law states that they must be postmarked or signed and dated before or on the date of the election. Despite this, many military votes failed to comply. The Republicans called for all military votes to be counted, intimating that the military can vote without rules. In the end, illegal absentee votes gave Bush the 537 vote lead that led to his victory.
• The Florida Supreme Court moved the deadline to November 26. The Republicans immediately appealed to the Federal Supreme Court to have all proceedings halted.
• On November 26, Katherine Harris announced a Bush victory. The Florida Circuit Court reversed the decision by a vote of 4-3, ordering manual recounts to resume on December 9.
• Three hours after recounting began on December 9, the Federal Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that all recounting must stop and Bush be declared the next President.
• According to Vincent Bugliosi, the Court "based its ruling on the allegation that in Florida, because there was a lack of a uniform standard of counting votes, this violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution."
THE AFTERMATH
The United States Federal Supreme Court:
• Ruled for the first time in its 210 year history that their finding be limited to a specific case. Had they not, voting irregularities would have been found all over the country.
• Ignored a 75-year-old Florida law stating that voter intent prevails over technicalities.
• Ruled along party political lines instead of impartially.
Of the Court's nine judges:
• Two of the five assenting judges (Scalia and Thomas) had blatant conflicts of interest with the Republican Party.
• A third assenting judge (O'Connor) had earlier said that she would only retire if her replacement was nominated by a Republican president.
• All three should have excused themselves from the vote.
One of the dissenting judges (Stevens) wrote: "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." • Months later, a media consortium declared that on the basis of their recounts, Al Gore had won the Florida vote. But the consortium decided to conceal the information from the American public. As the world descends into a chaos that stems directly from this coup, one would hope that those few journalists who are free from editorial restraint, would more often question these events. For example, when mentioning Bush, the word illegitimate (or a synonym) could be placed in conjunction with his name: Today America's illegitimate President announced... George W. Bush, the man who stole the 2000 election, will appear...
This is no conspiracy, it is a horrifying truth known long before this documentary was made. But even those who do their best to pay attention tend to let important events slip from consciousness. The mainstream media's refusal to deal with the coup of 2000 is tantamount to an enforced selective memory which elects to deal with an effect whose cause has been stricken from the record. Come to think of it, that is another goal of the Right.Top |
