This interview is incredible in scope - the GOP culture of corruption; racist disenfranchisement in Georgia and Virginia; Florida and Ohio; the complicit Supreme Court; Plame-gate; the hypnotized US media; Ney and Coingate; more!
The upshot: We will soon discover that the whole vile web of bribery and kickbacks - and no doubt extortion that has funded GOP's work to control "elections."
Read the *whole* thing!
Mark Crispin Miller Connects the Dots on Election ProblemsA BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW (Part 1 of two parts).
BuzzFlash: Your book, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them), makes a convincing case that Bush/Cheney stole the last election. It's not mere speculation, but a solid survey of appalling facts, all of them carefully documented. And yet there are a lot of people out there, many of them liberals, who seem unable or unwilling to accept the possibility that this administration would resort to vast election fraud.... But that view seems ever more absurd, as the Bush Republicans keep making flagrant moves to thwart democracy by rigging the electoral system to their own advantage. For instance, Bush has recently made two astonishing appointments to the Federal Elections Commission. One is Hans von Spakovsky, who helped Bush/Cheney steal the Florida election in 2000. The other is Robert D. Lenhard, the husband of Viveca Novak-the Time reporter who tipped off Karl Rove's lawyer that Matt Cooper, her colleague at the magazine, knew that Rove had outed Valerie Plame. So Rove went back to testify again to the grand jury, to tell them he had come across an e-mail that reminded him that he did meet with Cooper. So now the husband of this woman has been nominated to the FEC! What are we to make of such gross impropriety? Bill Clinton never could have got away with it.
Mark Crispin Miller: Let me begin by making a general point. When a movement tries to force an alien agenda on a democratic nation, it must devote itself full-time to that endeavor. The subversion of electoral democracy must be the movement's overriding goal, because it's very difficult to disenfranchise a majority....Because the US press refuses to go near the issue of election fraud, it's easy to assume that Bush & Co.'s subversion of the last election was just one of many dark endeavors. That assumption would be dangerously wrong. The subversion of American democracy is the primary interest of the Bush Republicans, whose vast electoral shenanigans were but a part of their ongoing program - a program not at all conservative, but anti-democratic and anti-republican. <snip>
BuzzFlash: Let's talk some more about the silence of the press. Last year it was reported in the Boston Globe that one James Tobin, who was Bush/Cheney's Northeast campaign coordinator in 2004, was convicted of overseeing a phone-jamming operation in the 2002 elections in New Hampshire. Tobin's aim was to thwart the Democrats' get-out-the-vote efforts in four cities in the south part of the state. The conviction was reported in the Boston Globe and by AP, and that was it. The press ignored the story, even though it seemed to point to a far larger, deeper scandal. According to the Globe, the RNC was paying Tobin's sky-high legal fees - somewhere over $700,000 by August of 2005. By now, the total may well be a million dollars. This is not a major story? The man who ran Bush/Cheney's re-election campaign in New England is convicted of election fraud for having violated voters' rights two years before, also in New England; and his sky-high legal fees are paid by the Republican National Committee, which is, these days, an arm of the Bush/Cheney White House. Why is this not a story? Officially it is as if it didn't happen.
Mark Crispin Miller: Here's another pertinent story that the press recently ignored - a story about 2004. A few weeks ago, it came out that ACORN
had prevailed in all three trials - two in Florida, one in Ohio - where they'd been sued for "voter fraud" by GOP-connected law firms. The last of the three cases was "dismissed with prejudice." This is highly significant, since ACORN's legendary criminality had long been trumpeted by right-wing propagandists as a veritable sea of evidence that all the fraud out there was Democratic handiwork. Nearly all the lurid propaganda tales of Democratic "voter fraud" concerned ACORN. Vented by a multitude of rightist pols and pundits, those tales ended up in countless mainstream news reports that airily referred to fraud committed "by both sides" in the 2004 campaign.
You connect those dots, and then connect them to the scandals now racking the GOP, because they also have to do primarily with election fraud. Tom DeLay's troubles stem directly from his close involvement in the party's efforts to subvert democracy through the construction of a permanent "majority." The gerrymandering in Texas, and the program to monopolize K Street, were both intended to help further weaken the electorate. Although the national press has shied away from it, the "Coingate" scandal in Ohio also has everything to do with the Bush Republicans' crusade against democracy. It was all about laundering enough cash to cover the huge off-the-books expenses of election theft, not only in Ohio, but from coast to coast. In fact, I believe that we will soon discover that the whole vile web of bribery and kickbacks - and no doubt extortion - that is just now making so much news, was ultimately at the service of the party's anti-democratic plans. Mark Crispin Miller's book "
Fooled Again is a must-read for anybody concerned about the health and preservation of our democracy." -- Joseph Wilson, author of "The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity: A Diplomat's Memoir"
Mark Crispin Miller's blog
http://markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/BuzzFlash - Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)
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