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Edited on Thu Nov-18-04 06:58 PM by ZombieNixon
My latest opinion piece for my paper. Will be published on Mon.
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DON’T CHANGE HORSEMEN IN MID-APOCALYPSE
The good news is that I can sport my anti-Bush stuff for four more years. The bad news is we get four more years of a highly questionable president as a result of a highly questionable election. “But...there’s nothing questionable about it. Bush won the popular vote,” you might say. That in itself is a little weird. Conventional wisdom has it that an incumbent president’s share of the vote rarely, if ever, bests his pre-election approval rating. So, with the famous “undecided” voters making up such a small percentage of the electorate, how on earth does a president with an approval rating of 48% garner 51% of the popular vote? I watched the exit polls in key states all day. In the morning, they heavily favored John Kerry. In the middle of the day, they were tied with a few one or two point margins either way. In the late afternoon, they favored Kerry again. All the pre-election polls showed the race tied and a majority of people thought the country was on the wrong track and said it was time for a change. Using an unrealistic assumption of no voter suppression or disenfranchisement, the only way Bush could have got an absolute majority of the popular vote was if every single one of the “undecideds,” who usually break 2-to-1 for the challenger, all voted for Bush.
Get real, people. Half the reason they were undecided was because they didn’t like the incumbent. It’s just as likely that voter suppression and fraud was involved. Take Ohio. In the wee hours of the morning, the Supreme Court overturned an Ohio appeals court ruling that barred Republican and Democratic “poll challengers” from standing in front of the precincts challenging eligible voters’ right to vote. I attended the meeting of the local Democratic party where the “poll challengers” were given their instructions. The campaign higher-ups who came down here from New Hampshire specifically told the attendees that even though they were called “poll challengers,” their jobs were to make sure that as many eligible voters got to vote as was possible. In other words, the Democrats were instructed to make as few challenges as possible. Doesn’t sound like the Democrats were trying to suppress the vote. Meanwhile, national Republican leaders stated that their challengers were at the polls specifically to challenge voters. This of course helps democracy...how?
Then there were the electronic voting machines. They were made by a corporation by the name of Diebold Systems. Earlier, during the primary season, Walden O’Dell, the CEO of Diebold, penned a letter promising to “deliver Ohio’s electoral votes to President Bush” in the election. Mighty suspicious. These machines leave no paper trail, so there’s no way to validate the vote. All it takes is for one in every five machines to miscount votes to skew the entire election. A report just came out showing that a computer error in an Ohio precinct gave nearly 4000 extra votes to Bush/Cheney. But whatever the reason, John Kerry lost and now we’re doomed. Winston Churchill once said that people get the government they deserve, so if a majority of the American people fell for Bush’s lies or if voters were too lazy to go out and vote for Kerry or if the Democrats didn’t play a good enough ground game, we deserve four more years of Bush.
In some ways, it’s a good thing. The Democrats in Congress have no obligation to be the “loyal opposition” any more. They can be as loud and feisty as they want and make the Republicans’ lives miserable. In the meantime, we can learn a few things from the Republicans. In 1964, when Barry Goldwater was crushed in Lyndon Johnson’s landslide, the Republicans got the catalyst they needed to step back and reexamine their party. They created think tanks, built a grassroots movement and remade the language of their message. They recreated “morality” as a wedge issue and then built FOX News. Now it’s our turn. We ran a good campaign, but we’ve got to reexamine how we go about further our cause. Our job is easier, because the facts are on our side. Poll after poll shows that we are in the majority. Fifty-seven percent of Americans believe that abortion should be safe, legal and rare. Eighty-three percent believe in a healthy environment. Ninety-four percent want stronger federal gun safety laws. Eight in ten think that health care should be available to all Americans. Learn these things. Make them “moral” issues. Is it moral to leave a scorched Earth for future generations to clean up? Is it moral to let irresponsible firearm usage kill inner-city kids? Is it moral to allow poor children to die every day because they can’t afford a visit to the doctor?
Next is the media. The Communists had Pravda. The Republicans have FOX and talk radio. Don’t just sit there and let yourself be rolled over. Write to your congressmen and demand the reinstatement of the fairness doctrine. Write to George Soros and Ted Turner and tell them to buy us a FOX News. Get progressive talk radio into as many markets as Rush Limbaugh. Clear Channel may be a Republican mouthpiece, but if they can make a good profit off us, they will. The station for Air America Radio (the liberal radio network) in Portland, OR, is already a Clear Channel station, so there is hope.
Take back the word “liberal.” If we got rid of all things liberal, Ann Coulter would still be mopping the floor in Connecticut. America was founded by “liberals.”
So Democrats, liberals and progressives, suck it up. Quit moping. Sure, it’s a setback, but use it to our advantage, because a one-party state is the end of democracy.
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If I get some good hate mail, I'll post it here, too.
Cheers,
ZombieNixon
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