The Election Debacle

  • posted by Elmo on 2000-11-09 00:00:00

Greetings,

And welcome to this historic first among historic firsts this week--a second, non-mailbag edition of "Elmo's Weekly Rant" coming out in the same week. But with everything else this week, that seems pretty normal. What a wild week!

Before I get into that, I have a few comments to make about my experiment this week, for which my fraternity brother John Barger coined the term "Talk Internet". I threw out a LOT of information and opinions the day before the election hoping to spark some thought, and boy did I ever!!! I had a few complaints of people who said if they got one more rebuttal from this list in their inbox that they were going to kick my rebuttal. Secondly, I really opened up a hornets' nest when I went into the subjects of LBL and the Great Depression. I've actually had a request for "easier" topics next time, like abortion and religion. All in good time, but today I want to say a brief word about civility. It's easy to get carried away when arguing a point, and some people feel that when their views are attacked that it is a personal attack on them. And thus, they counter with personal insults and even threats. It is a dark side of human nature which we all must be conscious of as we learn to become more effective communicators--because in addition to increasing hostility, it also blinds people to the logic of one's arguments. All they see is the negativity. I make a lot of strong statements here, but I try not to attack people personally. And when I do knowingly step on people's toes, I try to at least do it in a humorous way. Everyone on this list is a friend of mine, and I don't want to be responsible for any real hostility among you all. So rant away, but let's try to keep it semi-civil, ok? I will be summing up the rest of the Barger/LaBeck vs. Bright/Perry debate in the near future, but I decided that right now another rant of my own was more imperative. So with that being said, it's my turn to rant again.

Boy oh boy, has this been one bizarre week!!! First of all, hell has most surely frozen over since my brother Barry Williams (the world's biggest pizzaphile, who would eat pizza every meal of every day if he could) said in front of two witnesses that he was kind of getting tired of pizza. And then to my disbelief yesterday, the infamous Jason Cansler has returned from "the grave" to bring back his enigmatic "Word of the Day". I tell you... there has just been something about dead people this week... and they all came out to vote on Tuesday! But then again, in the words of one critic, "if dead People can run for the US Senate and win... what's wrong with dead people voting???" I should have promoted Pat Paulson's campaign more seriously--this could ironically have been the one election where he could have ran away with it. And that's the subject of today's rant... that election on Tuesday which the aforementioned critic has called the "most contested, dirtiest, stinkiest, most crooked election in our history".

How about those Democrats, huh? This election proves that those guys would literally do anything to take back Congress and keep the White House, including:

- Giving tens of thousands of illegal aliens pre- registered vote cards in California...

- Giving cigarettes to homeless people in Milwaukee in exchange for votes for Al Gore -- I read that one on MSNBC's website and there will likely be an investigation over it.

- Keeping the polls open until 11 PM in St. Louis (but not the rest of the state) so area Democrats would have plenty of time to vote...

- Having the dead rise up out of their graves and vote in States like Illinois, Arkansas, Alabama and many others...

- Electing a dead man to the U.S. Senate in Missouri, a position that will be filled by his widow who, to my knowledge, has no credentials whatsoever...

- Telling some voters in Tennessee that they couldn't vote because they were already dead...

(I'm definitely starting to see a trend with death and democrats here... could it be because they are mostly brain dead? OK, cheap shot, I know. Back to Civility 101, right?)

- Electing a woman (who prior to the election year never lived a day in your state) to represent you in the Senate just because her name is Hillary Clinton... .

- Electing a man to represent your state as Senator who is also running for Vice President, yet has so little faith in his own campaign and running mate that he won't abdicate the Senate run that will surely leave the seat to a Republican if he does become Veep...

- Spending $60 million of your own money to beat a contender who spent a tiny fraction of that... (when Congressional candidates typically spend around $1 to $2 million for an election)


Now that's incredible!!! (forget the old TV show by the same name!) But none of it was enough to take back the House or the Senate, it would seem.

So who else stayed up late on Tuesday night waiting to hear who the next President was going to be? I had planned to watch the returns and then write up a quick rant with my comments on the whole thing--the best laid plans of mice and men, right? I ended up staying up until around 2 AM, when they announced that "Dubya" had won. I just wanted to hear the acceptance/concession speeches and then I was going to bed, but no such luck. After waiting another hour or so they came back on and said that the Florida vote was so close that there was going to be a mandatory recount and that Al wasn't conceding anything.

Now I personally don't give a rat's patooty who wins. As expected, my man Browne didn't have a prayer--but voting for him sure felt good. As George Wallace put it, "there isn't a dime's worth of difference between a Republican and a Democrat" anyway. And since Al is a so-called "new Democrat" like his boss Bill, and "Dubya" for all his talk of "Compassionate Conservatism" is a big time oil man like his old man (the guy who coined the phrase "New World Order"), I don't see a whole lot changing with either of them. Both favor large corporations and special interest groups over individual people. Both will face a grid-locked Congress who will only be able to pass the most bipartisan of legislation. And considering that the only times these two parties usually agree on anything is when it benefits their common corporate contributors at the expense of the general populace, or expands the power of the federal government, there can be nothing good to come out of this. A great example of this is Sen. John McCain's bipartisan "campaign finance" proposal that will prevent nonprofit organizations such as the NAACP or the NRA from running issue-oriented ads before elections, and could be the death blow to free speech in this country if it goes through. But at least they'll be able to pass fewer laws on the whole, which will allow us to keep some of our liberties for a little while longer.

But this whole Florida thing smelled from the get go. I'm sure not very many of you have read "Vote Scam: The Stealing of America" by the Collier brothers, but it is a most fascinating read. Written in 1992 before Janet Reno became Attorney General, this book exposed her role in covering up massive vote fraud that has gone on for decades in the state of Florida. The book is well written with plenty of evidence and hard numbers to back their claims, and I have no reason at all to doubt its authenticity since the thugs who rigged all of those electronic voting machines down there came from Kentucky. I couldn't help but laugh my @$$ off when I read an internet article on the election in which a naive (or collaborating) reporter commented that Florida wasn't really a state known for voter fraud.

When they first called that Al was carrying the state, they only had about 3% of the votes in and any intelligent person was sure to ask how they could even make such a bold assumption with so little information. When they later took it back and ate much crow over it, it seemed from the numbers that flashed up that "Dubya" was kicking Al's bootie down there. Until in the end they declared Bush the winner only to take it back in the last second of the final inning.

Another thing that bothered me was why it took all night to count the votes in Florida, when (a) the polls there were among the first in the nation to close and (b) all of the voting was done electronically. As a median level computer programmer, I could easily write a program to track votes that could traverse through millions of records and give you a final total in a matter of a couple of minutes. But then again, I don't work for an elite corporation that holds exclusive government contracts and refuses to let anyone else view their "proprietary" source code. As though it were rocket science to record votes in a database--thousands of "Joe Average" webmasters have simple scripts on that tally votes on such highly relevant topics as what Hollywood actress has the nicest set of, um, eyes. But now that the recount has been ordered, it has taken a couple of days to traverse back through these records--again electronically--and as of my typing this they still don't have a final total. But somehow Gore has managed to gain something like eight hundred votes that were somehow missed earlier. Ummm hmmm....

What is more, since it's such a tightly contested election, everyone is coming out of the woodwork down there to say that there should be a revote. They've had over 19,000 ballets thrown out because more than one Presidential candidate was chosen (yet only a couple thousand made the same mistake with candidates for other races). If you read "Vote Scam", you'll find a similar instance where corrupt election officials sit around punching extra holes in ballets when they were supposed to be counting ballets. That would definitely explain the time lag. There is also a legal challenge pending in state court with the support of Democrats who say a poor ballot design in Palm Beach County led some Gore supporters to inadvertently mark their ballots for Pat Buchanan. However, I've seen a scan of that ballet design and you'd have to be pretty stupid not to be able to follow the arrows to the right spot. Of course, when you consider their choice for President... Anyway, they are griping that Buchanan got over 3000 votes there in a mostly democratic county, which was far more than in any other county. But I have come to find out that Pat Buchanan has a cousin that lives in that county who is quite active in getting out the vote--they say in the last election he got something like 8000 votes in the Primary that eventually went to Bob Dole.

Maybe in order to swing the pendulum in the other direction, I should claim that I didn't mean to vote for Harry--I really meant to vote for Bush and I think we should have another election in Kentucky. Sure, Kentucky carried Bush anyway, but now that everyone is crying out to abolish the Electoral College they may do that and then my changed vote would matter. In fact, I could claim I voted for Al and meant to vote for "Dubya", and then I could take a vote from Al as well as give one to "Dubya". I'd get two for the price of one, plus my vote for Harry still stands. After all, votes are anonymous and they have no way to find out for sure who I voted for. You know, while I'm shooting out sarcastic scenarios, maybe I should marry Hillary Clinton after she divorces Bill (you know it is going to happen after he leaves the White House) so I can inherit her Senate seat if she dies while running in the next election. Being the spouse of the person running seems to be the only requirement for holding the office these days. Nah, if I were married to her I'd be the one to die first, from suicide (if not legitimately then surely from the bullet-behind-the-ear Arkansas variety).

One final bit of vote fraud news... WorldNetDaily.com did a story on a large number military absentee ballets that weren't delivered on time and hints at possible conspiracy by the Pentagon, which they of course categorically deny. Soldiers do tend to vote Republican however, and with military readiness such a key issue this election some polls estimated 90% of the armed forces were pro-Bush. "Things that make you go hmmmmmmmmmm...", as Arsenio Hall used to say.

However, since I have just spent most of my rant dissing the Democratic party, I feel it is only fair to list the top 26 things that suck most about the Republican Party. For anyone interested, I pulled these from a great political forum site: www.freerepublic.com. Here it is... the Group Of P--sies from A-Z... (that's Pansies by the way, for those of you with dirty minds)

- A is for the Asset forfeiture laws -- that weren't repealed, but given only cosmetic changes.

- B is for the Budgets that just keep getting bigger and bigger.

- C is for Corporate welfare -- which expands and expands and expands.

- D is for the Debt -- which gets larger and larger, despite supposed "surpluses."

- E is for the Education and Energy Departments, which were supposed to be Eliminated, but have Expanded instead.

- F is for Federalism -- which continues to be trashed with every new GOP law.

- G is for all the Gun control laws the Republicans have caved in on.

- H is for HillaryCare - the health care takeover the Democrats couldn't pass all at once, but which the Republicans are passing one bill at a time.

- I is for IRS reform -- which was almost entirely a sham.

- J is for all the Judges that Clinton has nominated and the Republicans have approved, even though the Judges don't support the Constitution.

- K is for Keeping every single department and agency the Republicans promised to get rid of.

- L is for Laws, Laws, and more Laws -- thousands of them -- passed by the Republican Congress.

- M is for the Mandatory Minimum sentences, which are unconstitutional, immoral, and unjust, but the Republicans couldn't care less.

- N is for (what else?) the National Endowment for the Arts -- the Republicans' favorite fund-raising enemy, which of course they have enlarged, not eliminated.

[Don't take that to mean that I am opposed to art-- I've always been fairly "artsy" and my brother is a true artist--but it is debatable how much the NEA does to promote real art. Besides, it is a shining example of GOP hypocrisy]

- O is for Over-regulation, which continues to get worse, despite all the GOP promises.

- P is for the Pay hike for congressmen, who don't seem to get paid enough for ruining our lives.

- Q is for the Quotas that never go away, despite the endless posturing against them by Republicans.

- R is for Repealing laws -- something every Republican vows to do, but hasn't gotten around to yet. When will they start -- in 2009?

- S is for Social Security privatization -- and for the GOP transition plan, which would take 60 years to complete. (Just think, your great-grandchildren will be free from the Social Security tax! And, by the way, I have some desert property I want you to consider.)

- T is for the Tax burden, that continues to worsen for all Americans -- because every "tax cut" is nothing more than rearranging the awful cost of big government, which the Republicans have done nothing to lessen.

- U is for the countless Usurpations of power that the Ninth and 10th Amendments reserved for the people and the states.

- V is for the Victory the Republicans declare when they pass a bill, or when they get the Democrats to tone down a bill, even though every bill passed expands government further.

- W is for the Wars the Republicans always support -- enthusiastically or reluctantly, but support they do -- despite the bombing of innocent civilians, despite the rationale it provides for anti-American terrorists, despite putting our sons and daughters in harm's way. (Yes, it's a dangerous world out there. Who do you suppose made it that way?)

- X is for the Xenophobia the Republicans display against immigrants, imports, Serbs, and anyone else who gets in the way of the party's major backers.

- Y is for the unconstitutional and immoral Yugoslavian war, which Republicans not only didn't oppose vigorously, they exploited as an opportunity to pass a ton more of their pork-barrel political payoffs.

- Z is for their Zealous pursuit of the insane War on Drugs, despite its obvious failure and despite the countless human tragedies it has caused.


So there you have it--by remaining with the Republicans, conservative voters have said "well done" for the 26 betrayals listed above, providing a vote of confidence and telling the Republicans they don't need to change.

And by sending Democrats in to narrow the Republican lead by questionable means in some cases, liberal voters have sent Washington a message that Machiavelli was right--the end does justify the means. But wait, we already learned that message from the Clinton Administration over the past 8 years, who also taught us that oral sex wasn't sex and that the word "is" has multiple meanings.

So I guess the real mandate that voters have sent to Washington is that they want to keep the status quo, and we will see four more years of nothing productive getting done. We will continue to see our individual rights stealthfully siphoned from us, one hidden paragraph in a massive bill at a time. Government will continue to grow, the US will continue to march toward global oblivion, and Joe Six-pack will continue to enjoy his Monday Night Football without suspecting a thing.

Have a good week,
Elmo

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