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With BushCons owning the secret, proprietary source code that runs all the electronic vote tabulation machines in the country, as well as many individual voting machines, with no paper trail, the election was a fraud going in. It was almost entirely, if not entirely, non-transparent--with the real result decipherable from strong inferential evidence (Kerry won), but due to the deliberate non-transparency set up by the BushCons in Congress, and with many Democratic leaders silent or complicit (or suicidal, it's hard to know which), it is impossible to obtain what people talk of as "absolute proof."
A non-transparent election IS a fraudulent election. You don't have to "prove" anything more. It is inherently invalid.
Prove to me that Bush "won." Where are the numbers? Where did you get them from? How were they verified? The whole thing is a house of cards, or even less, a house of mere electrons.
There is NO proof that Bush won--and a lot of inferential proof (non-partisan exit polls and much other data) that Kerry won. Those are the facts.
And what we have now is an illegitimate government, agreed to by people with the power to enforce it--and not by "consent of the people"--most of them BushCons or BushCon travelers. (Congress, judges, the war profiteering media, and, unfortunately many Democrats including the candidate.)
We really shouldn't fool ourselves about this--whatever we may decide can be done about it. We are ruled by a junta. WE HAVE NO POWER in any conventional sense. They have taken away our right to vote. Our official leaders are now chosen behind a curtain, in cascades of electrons controlled by secret source code, and where only Bush "Pioneers" are allowed to go.
So, this is not a matter of "the jig is up" or the "diehards still trying to contest the election." This is not a matter of "losing" an election. People could get over that. It is a matter of losing our DEMOCRACY.
Personally, I think we have one chance to get back our right to vote--through local action on state and county election rules to re-institute paper ballots and hand counts, or at least to get some reasonable controls over the electronic voting machines.
I think this is doable. I think most people would agree that elections should be fair and transparent. We still have the power to influence local officials--but we may not have it for long (if the Democrats join with the BushCons to take away states rights over election rules--which would be a disaster in my opinion, no matter how bad certain states have been).
But Congress is NOT going to help. The BushCons have taken away our right to vote, and they are not going to give it back. Period. And the Democrats have no power to change this (--if they even want to; remember they ALLOWED this election system to be put in place, which has disenfranchised us all). (Some fought it, but not that many. No one spoke out loudly, as they should have. They SHOULD HAVE screamed bloody murder about things like BushCons owning the tabulation source code as "proprietary." It's absurd!)
As for "overturning" the Constitution, we have a perfect right to do so. It is OUR document (not Bush's, not Kerry's, not the Supreme Court's or anybody else's). Whoever can amend the Constitition can "overturn" it. We have that power--albeit through certain stated processes (state legislatures, Congress). But theoretically we could hold a Consitutional Convention tomorrow and re-write the whole thing from scratch. In fact, Jefferson recommended that this happen every 20 years or so. (What he said was, there ought to be a "revolution" every 20 years or so.)
It is by no means a "sacred" document. It's not the "word of God." Humans wrote it. Humans can amend and totally re-write it. It's not a can of worms that I would particularly like to open, at present, with a BushCon junta in power. But that underpinning of "consent of the people" is quite real. It was the basis for the American Revolution in the first place.
"There is no legal way to stop Bush from taking office." Nor was there any legal way for the Colonists to unseat George III, or deny him soverignty over their lands and persons. They appealed to a higher law. They very carefully notified all the capitols of the world. And they were willing to take arms to enforce the higher law that gave them the RIGHT to throw off King George's rule.
But that would be a very foolish and probably fruitless course today. We are not an isolated wilderness far from the seat of power. The powers that oppress us have all the weapons of mass destruction at their disposal, that they could wish for, all paid for by us, to crush any such rebellion.
But it is hardly unseemly to talk about it. We are a revolutionary country. The principle of armed rebellion against oppressive powers was our founding principle!
I don't care who among "the rest of the country" would "stop listening" to leftists who were discussing our founding principle AND stop listening to "the whole democratic party." Who cares?
Revolutions, both bloody and sweet, are always started by a few passionate people who couldn't give a crap what conventional wisdom says. They have the ideas, the inspiration, others follow (or not).
We have, too, in this situation, a Left consisting probably of a vast majority of pacifists or near pacifists--who have learned lessons from several wise people in our own age, and in some cases from a lot of experience, and a lot of reading and knowledge of history. Violence breeds violence is the rule for most historical revolutions. A violent elite is replaced by a violent mob which then develops its own violent elite.
It was Gandhi's brilliance--and later Martin Luther King's and Nelson Mandela's--to avoid any such cycle of violence, by starting out with peaceful intentions and sticking with them through all. Their goals were justice and transformation, not acquisition and power over others. And all were brilliantly successful revolutions.
Why do you suppose the BushCons went to such trouble to suppress black votes in this and in the last "election"? Because black votes are a thing of value, achieved with suffering in a long struggle, and black voters therefore don't cast their vote lightly and are not easily fooled. Martin Luther King's work lives on!
So, informed by these recent struggles, and the brilliant folk who have shown the way, non-violence is obviously the path we should take. We don't want to destroy persons or property, or even make others feel insecure. We want to transform our society so that all are agreed as to what justice is, and can achieve it together. Anything less would not be worth having.
Hotheads and those who believe in justice through fire arms can go elsewhere and fight that battle on their own, if that's what they're going to do. Few if any will follow them. It is a suicidal path in the present circumstance.
Once again, I think it's very important to be clear. It is all right to say that, in justice, Bush should not be in the White House, and to say it repeatedly. That doesn't mean you would go there and physically throw him out (at your very great peril). It doesn't mean you would harm anyone to assert your opinion. It merely means that that is what you believe. And why shouldn't we say what we believe to be the truth?
For politics' sake? Bah! That is not a good reason to suppress such a profound truth as this one, if this is what you believe: that Bush doesn't belong there, and is exercising illegitimate authority, due to the invalidity and non-transparency of the so-called election.
If you silence or bend a fundamental belief like this, you risk hypocrisy. And we've had quite enough of that in politics already, particularly from the Democratic leaders.
There may be times to be quiet--say, if life or limb is threatened, or that of others. We must always choose our ground. But if someone has chosen their ground, and their ground is here, in DU, and they are speaking the truth, or trying to do so, we ought to respect that.
We are leaders here, not followers. We are the passionate ones. We are the revolutionaries who may lead our country onto a better path, or who may fail. We want to find that good path and shine a light on it for others. We may not yet know what or where it is; we are explorers.
And so we see things others don't see. And we may go to the edge, to try to penetrate the B.S. that bombards all us constantly from official sources. We try to see these things clearly and interpret them. This may set us apart, and make others upset.
That's my hit on what DU is all about. It is not a place to put labels on dissenters. "Too radical." "Will alienate Democrats, or freepers." "Tinfoil hat." Those labels are meaningless here, in the unexplored terrority of America's once and future democracy.
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