Reply #37: Dear Godfather:

[Peace Patriot]

"Keep this in mind, we won in 2000 and we won in 2004. Having that moral(ironic, ain't it?)victory over Bush, and knowing he really lost, makes it easier to keep fighting his chimp ideas and moronic administration."

Yes, we won in 2000 and 2004, but we will never, never, never win again, because the BushCons now own and control the election system, and the Democrats and Kerry failed to strongly object when this inherently fraudulent system was put into place, failed to warn the voters what BushCons had the easy capability of doing (stealing the election electronically), and failed to protest when investigators came up with overwhelming evidence that that is what they did do.

Let me repeat: BushCons--Bush "Pioneers," major donors, one of whom stated in writing that he would "deliver Ohio to Bush in '04," and another who is a rightwing Christian nut--OWN AND CONTROL the system that records and counts all our votes!

That system is extremely insecure, unreliable and hackable. And they further insisted that it needs NO PAPER TRAIL (and achieved that in a third of the country).

Unless this system is dismantled, and we achieve TRANSPARENT elections, we will have no progressive president and no progressive Congress EVER AGAIN.

John Kerry betrayed us, lied to us, and then abandoned us to defend our vote ourselves. I shall never forgive him for it.

Betrayal: Sitting in Congress while BushCons took over our election system, and not screaming bloody murder about it, and warning us.

Lies: "Every vote will be counted"--repeated over and over again.

Abandonment: He should have burned his career to the ground, if that was necessary, to protest this election. He owed it to the people--the grass roots volunteers who worked so hard to elect him and who SUCCEEDED--and he owed it to the voters who came out in droves and stood in 10 hour lines to vote for him. He SHOULD HAVE protested this election!

Do I still love him? Maybe "love" is too strong a word. I think he's a good and decent and intelligent man (as insider DC politicians go, and in so far as anyone can tell these things from a distance). I do feel compassion for him--and for all the Democrats who have compromised and stood down in the face of BushCon thuggery. They are dealing with a dangerous, conscienceless, fascist coup. They are scared. And it is very understandable.

But I think we ignore these facts at our peril. Betrayal, lies and abandonment--by Kerry and by most of the Democratic leadership.

I was going to re-register Green, if the Democrats did not defend us by, or on, Jan. 6. (44 years a loyal supportive Democrat, through a lot of shit--the Vietnam War, NAFTA, the Iraq War!). Barbara Boxer and John Conyers have given me pause. I don't want to hurt THEM. So we'll see. I'm still considering what to do. And it may be that it doesn't matter--since we have, in fact, lost our right to vote.

What we have to do now is get it back!

I think our only hope in getting it back is local, state by state action. (The BushCon Congress is NOT going to reform the election system! --and they may do it more harm.) The Greens may be the best allies for such an effort. They alone have defended our right to vote. That is a reason to join them, and support them. (One can still vote for Democrats, selectively.)

Or, do we hang with Dean, Boxer, Conyers and others, and try to further empower them within the Dem Party?

Whatever anybody does as to affiliation, there is only one issue now: electronic voting, and who controls it.

(Vote suppression is a subset of that--it is not the main problem. The REASON BushCons felt so emboldened as to AGAIN hit black voters, after '00, is that they had control of the electronics and could manufacture a BushCon win. They had no fear of retribution!).

Godfather, I agree with you on several points, though.

1) Our situation now has little to do with how Kerry and the DNC ran the campaign. In fact they--we--won! Some think if they'd been stronger on the war, etc., we would have gotten a big enough margin to overcome the fraud. I think the BushCon hackers would have stolen whatever they needed to win, and with absolute zero vigilance in the press and by the Dems, would have gotten away with it. If the truth were known, something like 53% to 55% of voters agreed with Kerry and rejected Bush.

2) This is very heartening--that voters saw through all the B.S. (with no help from the press) and repudiated Bush.

However, many of these voters will never vote again. Most of them DON'T KNOW that we won--in large part due to John Kerry's early concession, even before all the votes were counted (so much for THAT promise!), and his continued silence. The (true) margin we produced for Kerry, in new voter registrations (Dems 57%, Rep 41%) and in Nader voters voting for Kerry, is a one time thing. The Bush "win" was too demoralizing. New voters will bail, as will Naderites and Greens.

But that majority IS heartening. The problem is, how to get its will enforced? And you just can't do that by standing down on their right to vote!