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CHANGED the exit polls. It means that Kerry not only had no chance for justice and fairness in Congress, he also had no chance for justice and fairness from the news monopolies. The news monopolies had already made their decision to endorse a fraudulent election and to make it seem right--by deliberately altering the exit polls (Kerry won) to fit the "official tally" (Bush won).
It seems hardly fair to me, or realistic--given this action by the news monopolies and what it means (that THEY chose the president, and deliberately SUPPRESSED strong evidence of election fraud, right on election day, on 11/2)--to say that Kerry "is the sole reason BushCo is still perpetrating crimes in our name."
That's why I wondered whether Kerry knew what they'd done with the exit polls. If he knew, it would have bolstered the advice he was getting that fighting the result was futile. And, in view of what the TV networks did to us (and to Kerry) that night, I would have to agree that it would have been futile.
But I don't think you had to know about the exit polls to know how badly the news monopolies had treated Kerry and his campaign, and what they would have done with a Kerry challenge. Look what they did with Richard Clarke, the 9/11 hearings, the torture revelations, Joseph Wilson and the treasonous Plame outing, the failure to capture bin Laden, the failure to find WMDs in Iraq, the mysterious beheading of "businessman" Nicholas Berg (whose email address was in Zacharias Mousaoui's computer), the assault on Falluja, the missiing billions in Iraq, the federal deficit, the federal budget, the Cheney energy task force meetings, and all other anti-Bush information!
With the TV networks belittling Kerry, marginalizing his challenge--and mostly ignoring and blackholing him--and all the fascist commentators chirping on the sidelines: "Bush won--by 2.5 million votes. Face reality, John Kerry! Get over it, whiner!"--it would not have been possible to inform that many people (60 million--or even 1 million) of what was going on, and get them mobilized to march on DC.
Dissenters from the news monopolies? Unh-huh. Look what the Bush Cartel did to CBS (and, recently, to Newsweek) with all the other lapdogs yipping and snapping in unison!
And so what Kerry had was this (if he had challenged the election)...
1. A Bushite "pod people" Congress that would not have ousted Bush no matter what the evidence was! They would have "spun" anything and everything. And I mean that. There is no way ANY evidence would have moved them. (And Congress has all the power in that situation. The only lever could have been the state certifications, but if the DNC wasn't into it--and they clearly did not give a damn--there was simply no way to organize state challenges. It had to go to Congress, and Congress was a brick wall.) (And the Supreme Court--which has no right whatsoever to decide presidential elections--wouldn't have gone near this one.)
2. Inferential evidence--no "smoking gun" or naked perps. A lot of evidence, but still, inferential (by design! --an UNVERIFIABLE election). And Bush's "pod people" in Congress are going to make the call against Bush on inferential evidence? Come on. A good many of them were in on it (the secret, proprietary programming code, owned and controlled by Bush partisans, etc.) They ridiculed the courageous Democrats who stood up and told the facts about Ohio--known facts, hard evidence--and they played along with Blackwell and ignored all the illegality. It mattered not a whit to them that tens of thousands of mostly minority voters were disenfranchised. They didn't feel the need to put up even a token of feeling about it--not even a false face. Ridicule, sarcasm, lies. And you think that statistical evidence would have made an impression on them, or you think they wouldn't have "spun" every fact uncovered in Ohio to their lapdog press? (These are the same people who put the torture memo writer, Alberto Gonzales, into the office of Attorney General!)
3. A total Bush lapdog news establishment--owned and controlled by billionaires and war profiteers.
I just can't see the reality of what you're saying, Blue Shark. It's a great fantasy--but it could not have happened, because the people--the 60 million you imagine filling the streets in DC--a) would have been greatly misinformed about Kerry's challenge, if they heard about it at all, and b) had no power, no handle on a challenge. If anyone had been able to mobilize that many people and gotten them into airplanes headed to DC, what would they have done when they got there? Stormed Congress? Stormed the White House? The bad guys have contingency plans for that kind of activity.
You think Kerry wanted to be responsible for blood on the streets? --especially given his chances with the Bushite Congress?
It's just not realistic. It's what we might have fervently wanted--not blood on the streets, but a challenge, a rallying call--but it does not fit the facts regarding what Kerry would likely be up against (had he challenged it) or who he was (a compromise candidate whom we all got behind to oust Bush--not a revolutionary leader).
And I don't think it's wholly Kerry's fault. I think it was partly the fault of the political system in which he was embedded--and of the people around him, his DNC advisors and that whole gang of insider Dems and hacks in DC, who chose him as the nominee. Yes, he WAS responsible for having the advisors that he had, and for being who he is--an insider, a player. But how then can you expect him to be a "white knight"? That was not possible. Surely you must have known that about him, watching him in the debates, and hearing what he had to say generally. He approved of Bush's war. He voted for it. He just thought he could do a better job cleaning up the mess. Etc. (--and truly he could have!). But he was no revolutionary hero; and certainly not the type to lead a Quixotic march into DC to challenge the election against hopeless odds.
I agree that 60 million people could not have been hidden by the news monopolies, and would have made some sort of impact, if--a huge if--that many could have been informed and mobilized. But to what end? You think the Bushites--who slaughtered 100,000 innocent Iraqis without a thought--would have acted on the wishes of ANY protest crowd, no matter how large? You think they would have overturned the election? No way! They would have skulked out of DC behind a phalanx of National Guardsmen, conducted a whitewash (if anythiing), and that would have been that. They would simply have shut down the capitol and moved it elsewhere, leaving military forces to mop up the mess.
And the news monopolies would most certainly have obeyed a declaration of national emergency and totally and completely lied about the size of the protest, the evidence of election fraud, and everything else.
I'm quite certain that the Bush Cartel had a backup election fraud plan--the terrorist alert plan--for Kerry winning by a 20% margin instead of 10%. (10% was fixable by a combination of electronic fraud and Ohio, FLA, etc. vote suppression. 20% would have required partial shutdowns of the vote count in certain states.) That's why all those phony "terrorist alerts" were planted in the news just prior to the election, and it's probably what Wayne Madsen stumbled over (money changing hands to set the "terrorist alert" fraud plan in motion, if needed), and I believe it's why Cheney took an otherwise inexplicable plane trip to Hawaii just two days before the election (an element in one of the "terrorist alert" backup plans).
The Bush Cartel had every election contingency covered--and I'm sure they planned for its aftermath as well. (--a series of "terrrorist alerts" to shut down the airports, for starters; and a phony "terrorist attack" if things got out of hand). As I recall, it was Condoleeza Rice who actually predicted attempted terrorist attacks during our election--in any case, they were all playing off that theme--and it wasn't just to instill fear. (By the end, everybody was laughing about the phony "alerts.") It was mostly to plant the seed, so that it would seem real when it happened (when real action was taken to cut off the voting or the counting).
Then there's the problem of how anyone could have gotten 60 million people to go to DC, given complete and total disregard of the matter by the news monopolies. There are just too many people who still depend on the news monopolies for a sense of reality. And the news monopolies would have used every trick in their considerable brainwashing arsenal to prevent such a protest and to blunt its impact. Because THEY chose Bush to be president (by fiddling the exit polls).
I would love for Kerry to have been a hero and a real patriot. But I can also see why he wouldn't have led or even supported a challenge--if indeed he had been convinced, at that point, that the election was stolen--something we don't know--and if he was only half-convinced, how could he lead such a rebellion? Dean might have led such a rebellion. He had the spirit! Kerry didn't--and it was pretty obvious throughout the campaign that he was not a populist, and certainly not anti-war (like the majority of the country).
He was a compromise candidate--someone who was obviously chosen to maintain the Democratic Party leaders' interests in the war machine. We all agreed on that compromise--because we wanted Bush out, now--and worked like the devil for that purpose (and succeeded!). But we were bushwhacked (so to speak) by the DEMOCRATS' failure to insure a transparent election (a failure that occured long before the election), by our consequent inability to provide absolute proof of a stolen election, on demand (by Jan. 6), and by all of the factors that likely gave Kerry pause (an obdurate, fascist Congress, and an obdurate, fascist news establishment.)
Do you really think Kerry joining Boxer's challenge would have made that much difference in how it was handled by the Bushites in Congress and their news monopoly echoes? Maybe a little more of a flurry in the "news" stream; maybe a bit more of a spotlight on Ohio and a barrage of naysaying discussion by rightwing ridiculers. Can you imagine an official investigation by the Bushites in Congress producing anything but a whitewash and a power play to validate Bush's election?
But such a thing would very likely have produced the death knell of Kerry's political power--maybe not permanent, but enough to entirely stop an insider like Kerry from proceeding with it. He would have been portrayed as a fool, as naive, as a threat to the empire. The Bush Cartel was also destorying Falluja at that time--and he would have been accused of treason and collusion with the enemy. They might even have instigated "riots" against him by "patriots" and brainwashed military people. They would have been relentless in destroying him, and, if he HAD brought 60 million people with him to DC, they probably would have had him killed.
I happen to like Kerry--just a personal feeling about the man. I strongly disagree with him on many issues and policies--and I never would have chosen him as MY candidate (in fact I swore in fall '02 that I would NEVER vote for anyone who voted for that war), but I don't think he's all that dishonest, as politicians go. I also don't think he's a coward. He just is who he is--a guy who has played the DC game for years, and is something of a "Mandarin" (above it all), but has a pretty good heart and high intelligence. I like how he handled Bush in the debates, and I think he would have made a good president. In fact, contrary to the opinion of many DUErs, I think he ran a good campaign. (He won! By a landslide!)
Like you, I am bitterly disappointed in his failure to protect our right to vote--after all those promises!--and I am also extremely disappointed in the Democratic Party, and in fact I'm still in shock over just how bad things are in this Party's leadership (having just gone through the Kevin Shelley thing in California, with Dem leaders helping the Bush Cartel to oust our vigilant, popularly elected Secretary of State, who had sued Diebold).
Again, I don't think these things are wholly Kerry's fault. I think if he had his druthers, we'd have honest news media, and a fair and just Congress committed to the common good. We would have a better "balance of power" among our branches of government, good relations with the rest of the world, and an honored placed at the UN and in other international institutions. And I don't think he ever would have invaded Iraq. But this is not the world in which he lives--and it's not the political reality that he is player in. This reality is a brutal, vicious, ruthless and conscienceless landscape in which uppity legislators can be anthraxed with impunity, and have their planes fall out of the air for no reason, with no public inquest conducted.
Within that context, Kerry is an okay guy, in my view. You may wish him to be Mahatma Gandhi, or Sir Lancelot. And he did have some of that kind of passion as a young man. But that was a long, long time ago.
Some of the above are my thoughts in retrospect. I, too, held out hope for a secret Kerry election fraud challenge plan. I thought it was possible he had a "smoking gun" in his back pocket, or was quietly conducting his own prosecutorial type of investigation. Actually, I think this is still possible--less and less probable as the months go by, but still possible. He--and we--are dealing with extremely dangerous people, and a plan by Bush's challenger to expose the election would necessarily have to be kept very secret, for the safety of all concerned. But, as the months go by, and Bush sinks further and further in the polls--to ridiculously low levels today (from too low to win, prior to the election), it appears far more likely that whatever plans Kerry may have do not include a direct challenge to the election (legally infeasible at this point), but might include impeachment.
Re Kerry's being a "Mandarin"--a Boston brahmin, and insulated from the rest of us by virtue of his wife's wealth (Kerry is not personally greedy, or financially corrupt, in my opinion). Partly because of who he is, he is more immune to, or oblivious to, the ravages to the grass roots of the stolen election, than, say, Dean would be, or some other type of candidate. He just doesn't see it, really--in my opionion. He doesn't credit that magnificent grass roots campaign that ousted Bush and elected him; doesn't see its tremendous importance; and perhaps isn't much moved by what we are suffering now. He is not a clear-eyed believer in democracy. He is living in, and participating in, a once great democracy that is now very divided between royalty and peasant, and he is not terribly sensitive to the lot of the peasants. He is much more like a Senator in the collpasing old Roman Republic than anything else. Those weren't bad people either, necessarily, as politicans go--just trapped in their time and circumstance. And we need to beware of projecting our hopes and dreams onto him or anyone like him--and beware of entrusting the job of restoring our democracy to anyone but ourselves, collectively, as a people.
I have to laugh at myself as to my vow NEVER to vote for anyone who voted for the war. Such an idealist I was then! Well, I'm more of a realist now (some might say jaded or cynical, but I really don't think so--just more open-eyed about what is likely to happen, and what our choices might be.)
Would I support Kerry in the future? The truth is I don't know what the future is going to bring. Our future is extremely uncertain. In theory, I would not want him as a candidate. But what if we are, once again, faced with a very narrow choice, between Nazi boots and a somewhat more liberal alternative? And what if the election system is maybe partially but not wholly repaired by then (2008)--(the task of repairing it being a long term and difficult project)? What if the military-industrial complex and our global corporate rulers will not permit a true populist to remain alive, let alone mount a winning campaign, and we have Kerry inflicted on us as the only choice, in an only semi-valid election, with Jeb Bush as other choice?
Would I VOTE for John Kerry in that circumstance? I probably would--in the hope that our rulers would permit us a bit of relief from this onslought of thievery and murder (to prevent bloody revolution, or forestall a Great Depression and collapse).
I think we need to stop acting and thinking as if our opinion matters at the "Mandarin" level of our (or is it their?) society (who WE would support, what WE want for the future), and start acting and thinking on ways to WIDEN OUR CHOICES, and to EMPOWER and to ENFORCE the will of the majority, and the true wishes of the people--ways to actually change the balance of power, and to utilize practical mechanisms of change (primarily, right now, state and local election rules, where ordinary people still have some influence).
THEY--both the Democratic and Republican "Mandarins"--are NOT GOING TO GIVE US who we might want. They are going to try their damnedest to narrow it to two pro-war, pro-corporate candidates, just as they did in 2004. It is our task to try to break their power over our choices, and open up our democracy.
And the strategy for doing that is a wide open issue--and might include all kinds of strategic compromises including (gulp!) voting for Kerry in '08, if there is any hope, at that point, that our votes would be counted. A Kerry administration would still be better than a Bush administration, as to the chances for change and reform. If Kerry can convince the corporate rulers than the change and reform will be very limited, they might permit his election. (In fact, this may be one of the reasons he didn't challenge the '04 election--he wasn't thinking of us, he was thinking of our corporate rulers and how they would have reacted--he would truly have become the "Jane Fonda" of this era, that is, kneejerk anathema.)
If Kerry was permitted to win, it would then be our task to push the changes and reforms as far as we are able to--specifically to prevent any further fascist coups, to reduce military spending, and to curtail corporate rule--with all kinds of new organizing, new organizations, new media and everything else we can think of, including perhaps, international union organizing, outreach to bullied countries, the invalidation of corporate charters, constitutional amendments (no more private money in political campaigns!), and of course dismantling the electronic voting scam.
This is all very theoretical. As I said, I think our future is very uncertain. But I CAN imagine putting aside all the emotion of '04, and making some hard-nosed, strategic decisions in '06 and '08, depending on where we are then. It may seem unthinkable to you now (a vote for John Kerry). Think about THEN--and what is probable.
And imagine this: John Kerry and Barbara Boxer in '08, with the "blue" states all having at least Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails and some even having Voter Verified Paper Ballots, and with the federal debt through the stratosphere, Bush Cartel scandals abounding, the stock market plunging, oil prices at $5 a gallon, a botched invasion of Iran or Venezuela, and consumer spending nearly halted. Would you vote for John Kerry in that circumstance?
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