Election Fraud 2004: Kerry, the Times and the Democrats

Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now (11.17.04 www.democracynow.org) asks why Kerry isn’t using $50 million in unspent campaign funds to assist in recounts of the election -“especially an Ohio recount. What’s the political imperative preventing Kerry from joining the Green and Libertarian parties who have raised $150,000 in the last week to file for a recount there? David Cobb, the Green Party candidate for president appeared on the Democracy Now program and excoriated Kerry for his silence on the issue, especially decrying his premature concession. The result is that we are now left with the great majority of Americans including even the majority of Democrats and independents essentially investing Bush once again with an unearned legitimacy through another fraudulent election without demanding a proper investigation.

Kerry’s brutally swift capitulation dramatically undercut his supporters and created confusion, with some wondering if Kerry and elements of the Democratic Party are somehow in tacit collusion with the Bush forces. My own guess follows Michael Thomas of the Observer in suggesting that like several Democrats before him, Kerry simply did not have the stomach for the job. (See his article and my comments: (http://dysbushtopia.blogspot.com/2004/11/
m-thomas-kerry-cant-handle-presidency.html), It seems that rather than face the demands of the presidency, Kerry preferred to return to his relatively undemanding Senate position.

The New York Times continues its campaign of burying the controversy over election fraud with a short AP article “Most Ballots Pass Scrutiny, Ohio Officials Say,” (11.17.2004). On the one hand, one can’t blame them for not daring to get out in front of Kerry and powerful elements of the Democratic Party. On the other hand, they seem to be dismissing the clear threat to democracy in this country if this fraudulent election is allowed to go unchallenged. In their Nov 14 editorial, “About Those Election Results,” not once but twice the Times editors assert “that there is no evidence” that the “nightmare scenario of electronic voting” might have occurred, all the while assiduously ignoring any such evidence and refusing to allow their reporters to properly investigate the Ohio and Florida results. As they determinedly look the other way, evidence and studies of suspicious discrepancies between the exit polls and the official results continue to pile up on the Internet. By mid November, googling “Election Fraud 2004” yielded more than two million results.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the posture of the Times on the election may be striking a chord with its readers, and with the majority of Democrats. Once Kerry conceded, even the most passionate Bush haters seemed to prefer to tune out evidence that Kerry might have won the election. For many, such a reaction may be understandably defensive. As emphasized by the anonymous author of “How I stole your election by George W. Bush,” widely distributed on the internet (http://www.goxray.com/index.php?id=648&cat=17), there is nothing to prevent an continuation and extension of the Republican juggernaut in the 2006 and 2008 elections by similar means. For many, such a scenario may be too awful to confront. It is much easier psychologically to accept the official story rather than to face the anxiety-generating turmoil of a leaderless and perhaps fruitless campaign to highlight the 2004 anomalies. Most people, like the editors of the Times, may be simply trying to get on with their lives, attempting to find their personal and isolated ways to accommodate the new reality of a radical extremist junta rapidly consolidating power.