Reply #63: Well...

[Peace Patriot]

...trying to overturn an election is similar to trying to win an election in the first place. Of course you get your hopes up! You have to. You have to think it's possible--even if you know it's a Quixotic effort (as sometimes is the case when people run for office who don't have much chance, but do it for the issues, or for next time). It's just human nature to need to think, well, maybe...

Also, you have to keep the main goal or principle in mind: overturning THIS obviously fraudulent election because it's WRONG. We have the wrong man in the White House. Because if you don't keep that goal or principle in mind, you can become too Machiavellian (or what is meant by Machiavellian)(poor misinterpreted fellow that he is!)--too manipulative, too DNC-ish, too compromising, too opportunistic, etc.

But you need to do a sort of Zen trick: Go for it, and not go for it! Go for it, but be prepared for ANY outcome.

You never know anyway, when you turn over a hornet's nest like this one, what the outcome will be.

Remain clear: Bush lost this election. Kerry won. (It couldn't be clearer.)

Work to restore justice (Kerry in the White House). And work to restore PEOPLE--to help Kerry voters understand what happened, to support the investigators and activists, to help the Democratic leadership know what they must do --to restore people's hearts and minds, and dreams.

And create secondary or later goals--for after this fight is over (but still very related to this fight). One doable one is: a) A paper trail for every vote; and b) open source code--and figure out how that can be accomplished. Aim at restoring our right to vote in time for the '06 Congressional election. (If we are right about Kerry's majority, and the REAL political tenor of the country--and I think we are--then we CAN elect a progressive Congress in '06. We HAVE the votes. We just have to get them counted.) (It would sure help this later goal if the Democratic leadership would stand up NOW and challenge this fraudulent election. But even if they don't, we MUST go for this somewhat later goal--after January--of getting our voting system out of the hands of rightwing Bush supporters.)

Another goal which has been spoken of is corporate media product boycotts--which I think is a really good idea.

I agree that we should try not to be fooled--try not to get carried away with false hopes. But it's a balancing act. If you DON'T see clearly where justice is, and what its accompishment should look like, then either you won't act at all, or you will get side-tracked or settle for less than you should.