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While
Watchdogs Sleep
April 3, 2003
By Burt Worm
There's something missing in Lewis Lapham's otherwise excellent
list of "Causes for Dissent" in the April 2003 of Harper's.
Lapham cites ten reasons to oppose the received opinions being
passed off as conventional wisdom by the Bush administration
and their stenographers in the US media. In his customary
mordant style, Lapham dissects the sickness American discourse
has succumbed to in the age of Bushist agitprop, fear- and
warmongering, moral inconsistency with respect to Iraq and
North Korea (for example), and arrogance ("insolence of office"
he calls it), to touch on about half of the symptoms he probes.
But as enjoyable - and as positively enraging - a piece of
contrarian pugilism as Lapham's piece is, he never goes near
what I view to be the quintessential cause for resistance
of the Bushists and their degraded agenda for the nation,
the mother of all causes for dissent: George W. Bush's illegitimate
"presidency."
I don't know why Lapham omitted this key to all Bushist mysteries,
whether the fog of war made him forget or whether he simply
doesn't think it's important. I do think it's important. For
me, the war, rather than making me forget, has brought November
7-December 12, 2000 into sharp historical relief. For me,
the war is fundamentally illegitimate because the administration
waging it is fundamentally illegitimate. Granted, if I accepted
the hypothetical legitimacy of this regime, I would still
oppose the war on all the other grounds for which I currently
oppose it. But a bad war is made all the worse because these
hands on the reins of power, these hands that have destroyed
the US's standing among nations and unnecessarily endangered
the lives of Iraqis and Americans, should not have been there
to lead us down this tragic path in the first place.
We must not forget this essential fact about the Bushists:
they did not win the presidency legitimately. I repeat: This
is not mere opinion but hard fact.
The evidence for Bush's defeat in Florida is enumerated on
several Web sites, news agency archives and a small library
of books. It resides in the findings of the NORC study, released
in November 2001 under the misleadingly "reassuring" headline
that Bush really would have won the Florida vote. In fact,
this would have been true, according to the NORC study, only
if the state-wide manual recount of undervotes that Justice
Antonin Scalia had stopped on December 9 had been permitted
to continue to its finish or if Gore's legal team had won
the right to "cherry-pick" the traditional Democratic strongholds
on Florida's Gold Coast. As is well known among dissenting
Democrats (and other outraged democrats), however, Gore would
have won in every single instance in which machine-discounted
"overvotes" as well as "undervotes" were manually recounted
statewide.
The evidential crux of Bush's illegitimacy lies in this other
indisputable fact: the standards for the recounts that defeated
Bush in every instance of the NORC study were different shades
of what is known as "the Florida standard," which was twice
affirmed in Florida Supreme Court decisions rendered decades
before Election 2000. In essence, the state's highest court
ruled that in manual recounts, "hypertechnicalities" (their
term in both decisions) should be weighed less than determination
of the voter's intent. This means, for example, that ballots
on which the voter has punched out the candidate's slot on
his or her line and then written in the same candidate's name
on the write-in line should not be disqualified (as they are
automatically in machine counts) because the voter has made
clear his or her intent. As the NORC study makes glaringly
clear, if the Florida standard had been applied as it should
have been in the very first week of the election mess, there
would be no doubt about the legitimacy of President Gore.
These facts are extremely well-known; it seems almost ridiculous
to persist in retelling them. And yet, who, lately, has taken
the trouble to recount them, to keep this outrage afire in
the public discourse, as it should be?
Of course the Bushists have been adept, since September 11,
2001, at keeping critics at bay by impugning the patriotism
of anyone brave or foolish enough to challenge their competence
and morals, let alone legitimacy. The Bushists have used the
rich opportunity Gulf War II affords them to demonstrate anew
their mastery at squashing dissent.
Some may believe that the little public relations setbacks
the administration has been suffering in this war that is
more difficult in practice than on paper are signs that the
Bushist machine is not quite as formidable as it seems; that
the essential hubris of people like Donald Rumsfeld and Richard
Perle, ticking away like a time-bomb inside them, must necessarily
implode the administration from within. I, however, am pessimistic.
It is a mistake to bet against the Bushists based on a wish
to see them do badly. These illegitimate men - these bastards?-
are being permitted, by the media and by the Democratic "opposition,"
to do as they please with their ill-gotten power without anyone
raising the slightest objection to the illegitimate means
that enabled them to pursue their illegitimate ends. Only
once in the buildup to this war did I ever hear a single,
accidental pundit - Hedrick Hertzberg of the New Yorker in
a segment on The News with Brian Williams, of all places -
question the legitimacy of the war based on the dubious legitimacy
of the administration. Indeed, the Senate Democrats actually
rewarded these sons of bitches with the most imperial executive
war powers since Richard Nixon!
If Bush's illegitimacy rested only on the little pieces of
evidence embedded (pardon my French or freedom, as the case
may be) in the NORC study, even I might allow the fog of this
pathetic, destructive war to cloud out the sinking feeling
I carry that something horrendous happened to our democracy
in the late autumn of 2000. But the violation cuts deeper
than a mere miscounting of the votes. Let us never forget
that the votes were not just miscounted; they were prevented
from being counted at all. Even if Bush had won some or all
of the NORC recounts applying the Florida standard, his alleged
"victory" would not stand on the bedrock of democratic rule,
an impartial accounting of the voters' intent as exhibited
by their ballots, but on suppression of that accounting. One
need only conjure the image of James Baker III repeating his
lies about the votes being counted and recounted and recounted
again to reconnect with the con enacted shamelessly and in
full view of the stupefied American media.
The patterns we are witnessing unfold between the Bushists
and their sleeping watchdogs in the press and in the Democratic
Party were well set by December 12, 2000. The Bushists are
being permitted to wage this illegitimate war just as cluelessly
now as they were permitted to subvert democracy back then.
It is unlikely that the Bushists will be shepherded toward
justice for their crimes against democracy by our sleeping
watchdogs. Our only hope lies in the possibility that the
people will not shirk their responsibility to speak out about
this painful fact about our "president" relentlessly. Our
dissent is fundamentally legitimate. Our knowledge of that
and of Bush's fundamental illegitimacy is our power, if we
choose to use it.
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