_____________________________ ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN News * Analysis * Research * Action _______________________________ SPECIAL EDITION - November 24, 2000 - ______________________________________________________________________________ The U.S. Election Crisis: RACISM, THUGGERY, STATE POWER ______________________________________________________________________________ CONTENTS: 01. THE VILLAGE VOICE [New York]: Racism - Florida's Real Scandal. 02. THE MEDIA CONSORTIUM [Arlington, VA]: Mob Rule Wins for W. 03. WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE [UK]: The Republican Right Prepares for Violence. 04. THE NEW YORK TIMES: Protest Influenced Miami-Dade's Decision to Stop Recount. 05. THE WASHINGTON POST: Rage Sharpens Conservative Rhetoric. 06. MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: A Stolen Democracy. * * * ____________________________________________________________________ Chad Is a Country in Africa RACISM - FLORIDA'S REAL SCANDAL ____________________________________________________________________ THE VILLAGE VOICE Mondo Washington November 22 - 28, 2000 http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0047/ridgeway.shtml#chad by James Ridgeway When Joe Lieberman unctuously declared on Meet the Press Sunday morning that "every vote counts," he wasn't talking about the ballots not cast by African Americans, Haitians, and other minorities in Florida. In many respects, the untold story of the election lies not with the excited middle-class white Democrats of Palm Beach County, but with the thousands of black people who were turned away from the polls in a bizarre rerun of the segregated South before the Voting Rights Act. It is the most amazing irony of the election in that the black populations, which for years have formed the base of the Democratic Party--at least before the Democratic Leadership Council took over--were prevented from voting with amazingly little protest from the party bigwigs. These voters could easily have carried the vice president to victory in Florida. And, of course, the Republicans--who now are the real Southern Democrats--have refrained from even mentioning the subject. Not only were many blacks blocked from ballot access in Florida, but the Gore team apparently ignored them on election day. Campaign boss Bill Daley's main goal seems to have been to count and recount the votes of Palm Beach County, which the vice president won by 140,000 votes. Not once did Daley ask for a new election so these disenfranchised black citizens could vote. And only as an afterthought did he even raise the possibility of recounting all the votes in the state. In fact, the most vigorous proponent of a state recount has been Nebraska Republican senator Chuck Hagel. One thing now seems clear: On election day, many white Florida election officials were doing their utmost to make sure blacks and other minorities didn't vote. That's the real scandal in Florida. The NAACP, which continues to pile up testimony from African Americans who say they were disenfranchised, wants the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the situation. "This is a corrupted, tainted process, an attempt to steal an election," Reverend Jesse Jackson said last week. Among the claims: * That African Americans received phone calls the weekend before the election from people who claimed to be with the NAACP, urging them to vote for Bush. (Similar calls were reported in Michigan and Virginia.) * That roadblocks were set up a few hundred yards from voting places in Volusia County. Police stopped cars and ordered black men to get out of their vehicles and produce identification. (The Justice Department is reviewing the complaints to determine whether they amount to violations of law.) * That the morning after the election, employees at four predominantly black Miami-area schools which had been used as polling sites found stuffed ballot boxes, which apparently had not been counted. (The boxes were sent to elections officials.) * That, in a maneuver that smacks of the civil rights fights in the old South, substantial numbers of blacks were turned away from polling booths in various parts of the state. In Hillsborough County, sheriff's deputies who checked voter IDs allegedly claimed that the race of the prospective voters--which is listed on Florida voter ID cards--didn't match the race of the person standing in front of them. "I can't tell you how many times it happened," Sheila Douglas of the NAACP told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, "but it happened more often than not." (In addition, Nizam Arain, who works with Jackson's team of investigators, claimed black men in Hillsborough County were turned away from polling places as convicted felons, even though such proof was lacking. Jackson later said some black voters in the county were told there were no more ballots or that polls were closed.) * That in largely Republican Duval County about 27,000 people were disqualified when they attempted to vote. More than 12,000 disqualifications came from four districts that are mostly African American. "While I expected some complaints, it struck me . . . that this was startling in its scope and size," said Penda Hair, director of the Advancement Project, which advocates social and racial justice. "It seems that in counties across Florida, voters who were qualified were turned away at the polls. It was a denial of the right to vote that seemed to be concentrated in African American precincts." Additional reporting: Rouven Gueissaz and Theresa Crapanzano This story is part of the Village Voice's ongoing 2000 presidential election coverage. http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/powertrip2000/ Copyright 2000 The Village Voice. All rights reserved. ***** THE CONSORTIUM FOR INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM Suite 102-231, 2200 Wilson Blvd. Arlington, VA 22201 E-mail: consortnew@aol.com Web: http://www.consortiumnews.com - Friday, 24 November 2000 - ----- ____________________________________________________________________ MOB RULE WINS FOR W ____________________________________________________________________ http://www.consortiumnews.com/112400a.html Texas Gov. George W. Bush appears to have sealed his claim to the White House through a premeditated mob action that influenced the crucial Dade County decision to halt a recount. Egged on by Republican phone banks and heated rhetoric over Cuban-American radio, a pro-Bush mob of about 150 people descended on the Dade County canvassing board Wednesday as it was preparing to evaluate 10,750 disputed ballots. "Republican volunteers shouted into megaphones urging protest," The New York Times reported in today's editions. "A lawyer for the Republican Party helped stir ethnic passions by contending that the recount was biased against Hispanic voters." The protestors carried anti-Gore signs, including one that read: "Rotten to the Gore." The demonstration then turned violent as the canvassing board sought to go into closed session to begin examining the ballots. Dade County's Democratic chairman, Joe Geller, was chased by the crowd and required police protection. The mob also charged the offices of the supervisor of elections and began pounding on the doors. Several people were roughed up before sheriff deputies blocked the demonstrators' path and restored some order. The shaken three-member canvassing board promptly reversed its decision to count the ballots that many observers believed contained a large number of uncounted votes for Vice President Al Gore. One canvassing board member, David Leahy, admitted that the board's decision to bail out on the recount was affected by the presence of the angry demonstrators. "This was perceived as not being an open and fair process," Leahy said. "That weighed heavy on our minds." When the canvassing board halted the recount, the Bush supporters cheered. The Gore camp saw no recourse but to appeal again to the courts. On Thursday, however, the state Supreme Court rejected a motion to compel Dade County to resume the recount, although the canvassing board previously had judged the recount necessary to correct errors in the voting-machine tabulations. By stopping the Dade County recount, the Republicans appear to have guaranteed that Bush's 930-vote lead will survive any Gore gains in Broward and Palm Beach counties. That, in turn, means that on Sunday night, Bush almost certainly will be declared the winner of Florida's 25 electoral votes and thus the presidency. Gore's lawyers indicated that they might contest the Dade County results after the certification of a Bush victory on Sunday. But pressure already is mounting on Gore to drop any further legal challenges and accept Bush's "victory." Gore is coming under that pressure despite having won the national popular vote and apparently having been the choice of a plurality of Florida voters, though many of their ballots apparently were discarded for a variety of reasons. Typical of this Democratic desire to submit to angry Republicans, The Washington Post's liberal columnist Richard Cohen wrote today that "Given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush." Cohen reached his conclusion although Gore has been the one to temper his rhetoric while Bush and the Republicans have escalated their public denunciations of Gore and the Florida Supreme Court. The mob assault on the Dade County canvassing board came amid this angry Republican rhetoric. Bush's top recount adviser, James Baker, denounced the Supreme Court on Tuesday night and threatened to seek redress from the Republican-controlled Florida legislature. Bush blasted the Supreme Court on Wednesday as the Miami mob action was in motion. Bush accused the court of using "the bench to change Florida's election laws and usurp the authority of Florida's election officials." In lockstep with the Bush campaign's verbal assaults, Republicans in Miami unleashed the violent assault on the Dade County canvassing board. Rather than a state Supreme Court order "usurping" the authority of election officials, the Republicans opted for mob action. The strong-arm tactics carried the day. Bush now appears likely to ascend to the presidency not only as the first popular-vote loser to do so in more than a century, but as the first in modern U.S. history to benefit from a mob intimidating an election board into throwing away thousands of ballots cast by American citizens. Copyright 2000 The Media Consortium. ***** WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) Web: http://www.wsws.org/ E-Mail: editor@wsws.org - Friday, 24 November 2000 - ----- ____________________________________________________________________ THE REPUBLICAN RIGHT PREPARES FOR VIOLENCE ____________________________________________________________________ By the Editorial Board News & Analysis: North America: US Elections http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/nov2000/elec-n24.shtml The frenzied response of the Bush campaign and its allies in the media to Tuesday's ruling by the Florida Supreme Court has highlighted a political fact of immense significance: the Republican Party has become the organ of extreme right-wing forces that are prepared to use extra-parliamentary and violent methods to achieve their aims. Spokesmen for George W. Bush and pro-Republican media outlets reacted to the court's decision, which simply affirmed the constitutional requirement that all votes be fairly counted, with calls for the Florida legislature to defy the court and appeals to the military of a semi-insurrectionary character. The barrage of lies and misinformation--charging the court with "changing the rules" and "rewriting the election statutes," denouncing Democratic candidate Al Gore as a thug out to steal the election, appealing to racist and anti-Semitic sentiments--had its intended effect. On Wednesday morning a mob of Bush supporters besieged the Miami/Dade County board of canvassers, grabbing a Democratic lawyer and threatening to assault those involved in manually recounting the ballots. A few hours later the Democratic-controlled board announced it was abandoning its recount, effectively disenfranchising hundreds of Gore supporters whose votes were not registered in the original machine tally. The official responses of the Gore and Bush campaigns to the court ruling provided a stark contrast. Gore went on national television late Tuesday to appeal for a show of national unity and a public commitment by the Bush campaign to abide by the ultimate result of the Florida recount. Repeating his offer to meet with his Republican opponent, Gore spoke as a bourgeois politician worried over the prospect of an open breach within the political establishment that could undermine an orderly transfer of power, with unpredictable and potentially explosive consequences. Bush's representative, former Secretary of State James Baker, did not even bother to acknowledge Gore's appeals for unity or his offer to meet with the Texas governor. Instead he denounced the Supreme Court ruling as "unacceptable" and incited the Republican-controlled state legislature to defy the court, saying, "One should not now be surprised if the Florida legislature seeks to affirm the original rules." Baker was taking his cue from the Wall Street Journal, which had editorialized in advance of the court decision: "The legislature has an option, it seems to us a duty, to make clear that it stands ready to resolve any dispute between Mrs. Harris [the Republican Secretary of State and co-chair of the Bush campaign in Florida] and the Supreme Court Democrats. Since the Republicans now solidly control the legislature, they hold the winning hand." Paralleling its role in the impeachment conspiracy against Bill Clinton, the Wall Street Journal has served as the mouthpiece for the extreme-right forces that have sought from election day on to pollute public opinion with wild accusations and disinformation and hijack the election for the Republicans. It has spearheaded the effort to foster a veritable mutiny within the military against a possible Gore victory, using as the pretext the rejection of several hundred legally deficient absentee ballots from overseas military personnel. On Wednesday the Journal carried an incendiary column entitled "The Democratic Party's War on the Military." Calling the exclusion of the military ballots "one more battle in the ongoing culture war between the core of the Democratic Party and the US military," the column exuded racism, homophobia and hatred for the working class. The author spoke of the "twitching carcass" of the Democratic Party's "left...teachers' unions, feminist activists, gay victimologists, black churches, faculty clubs." As the election crisis has progressed, thinly disguised appeals to racism and anti-Semitism have with increasing frequency appeared in the broadsides of Bush supporters. Republican backers have seized on the role of Jesse Jackson to whip up anti-black prejudice and fastened on the large number of Jewish retirees in Palm Beach to galvanize their fundamentalist partisans. The Journal has not refrained from such methods. In the editorial cited above it employed loaded terms to take a swipe at Florida's Jewish population, charging that Mrs. Harris is "under fire for being a Southern aristocrat rather than a New York sophisticate." It went on to denounce the Democrats for "import[ing] Jesse Jackson for some race-baiting." The editorial as a whole was a call for the Republican Party to forego traditional constitutional restraints in its drive to capture the White House. It concluded with a barely disguised injunction for a victorious Bush campaign to fashion an administration along authoritarian lines: "The conventional wisdom is that if with this hassle Governor Bush does become President he will be a crippled one. Perhaps. But we find it equally plausible that facing down the kind of assault now being waged in Florida would be precisely the best preparation for what may lie ahead. It is Governor Bush's nature to extend the velvet glove, but he will be much more successful if he and his party can show that within it there is some steel." Significantly, the editorial was entitled "The Squeamish GOP?" The Journal chooses its words advisedly, in this case employing a term that connotes an aversion to bloodshed. The meaning of the newspaper's editors was unmistakable--a Republican president must be prepared to use violence and repression to impose its reactionary social agenda. Gaining the White House by suppressing votes and riding roughshod over the popular will is an excellent preparation for dealing with "what may lie ahead"--i.e., widespread popular opposition. It is high time to stop masking the character of the Republican right with the complacent term "conservative." These are fascistic elements who are breaking with the traditional methods of bourgeois democracy. There is a logic to politics. Once influential sections of the ruling elite conclude they cannot achieve their aims through democratic means and take the path of conspiracy and repression, they are well on the way to civil war. It is not here a matter of predicting the imminent imposition of a military dictatorship. But it would be the height of folly to ignore the signposts of such a danger looming ahead. If the campaign the Republicans are waging to gain the White House begins to resemble a covert operation akin to those mounted by the CIA against US imperialism's liberal and leftist opponents in Latin America--for example, in Chile--then it must follow that an option under serious consideration is the Pinochet solution. No one should doubt that Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley and the reactionaries on his staff are already working out the arguments to justify the use of violence against their political opponents and the working class. The Wall Street Journal speaks for powerful sections of American big business. These forces within the financial elite have increasingly adopted the standpoint of the extreme right, and sponsored, financially and otherwise, the growth of this fascistic element, precisely because they have come to realize that they cannot impose their social agenda through normal democratic channels. They rely on the right-wing rabble that populate the corporate-controlled media to conceal their anti-democratic aims and fill the airwaves with half-truths and lies. Their strength does not lie in any great popular support--on the contrary, their support in the general population is marginal. Rather, the strength of the Republican right consists in the fact that it articulates more consistently and uncompromisingly than any other bourgeois political grouping the requirements of the American corporate elite. The radical right knows what it wants and is prepared to ride roughshod over public opinion in order to get it. The Republicans do not play by the normal constitutional rules, while their bourgeois opponents in the Democratic Party wring their hands as impotent and passive onlookers. They embody a demoralized liberalism, whose watered-down perspective of reform has been discarded by the ruling class. At the same time the Republican right senses that it has a narrow window of opportunity for realizing its ambitions. It was staggered by the results of the election, which registered a victory in the popular vote for Gore and, if the intent of Florida voters were officially acknowledged, a Democratic victory in the electoral vote as well. The combined vote for Gore and Green Party candidate Ralph Nader showed, broadly speaking, that a significant majority of the electorate supported policies of a liberal and leftist character, and opposed the increasingly naked domination of corporate power over American politics. A look at the electoral map underscores the fact that the overall trajectory of American society does not favor the forces of the radical right. Bush piled up the vast majority of his electoral votes in the more backward and rural regions of the country--the South, the Southwest, sections of the Midwest. The more urbanized, industrialized, densely populated and culturally vibrant regions went for Gore. Within this general scheme, the decisive pro-Gore margin in the popular vote was provided by blacks and other highly oppressed sections of the working class, whose vote expressed deep distrust of the Republicans and a determination to defend past gains in civil rights and social conditions. Moreover, the economic conditions fostering the rise of nouveau riche layers that comprise a critical component of the Republican right's social base are clearly receding. The stock market boom, based to a considerable extent on speculative capital, parasitism and outright swindling, is breaking up, leaving in its wake a society more economically polarized than at any other period in the past half-century, and a spectacle of corporate greed and criminality of unprecedented dimensions. The response of the Republican right is growing hysteria. Its frenzy and recklessness bespeak a rebellion by a minority that feels it must stake all on immediate victory, because its future prospects are dwindling. The Republicans sense that the 2000 election is their best, and perhaps last, chance to seize hold of all the branches of government. If they lose the White House, they face the prospect of internal warfare and political disintegration. Notwithstanding the many obvious differences, there are striking parallels between the political crisis arising from the 2000 election and the convulsive period that led up to the Civil War of 1861. One of these is the similarity in psychology and methods between the Republican right of today and the political representatives of the Southern slave owners 150 years ago. In both cases, the most reactionary social forces in the nation were driven by a sense of desperation, arising from the fact that the momentum of historical development was moving against them, to employ the most provocative and reckless methods. One great difference, to extend the historical analogy, is the absence within any faction of bourgeois politics today of a force either willing or able to take on and defeat the radical right. As they have repeatedly demonstrated, the flaccid ranks of liberalism, institutionalized in the Democratic Party, are organically incapable of waging a serious struggle in defense of democratic rights. That task now falls to the working class, which must construct its own mass, socialist party to carry it out. Copyright 1998-2000 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved. ***** ____________________________________________________________________ Miami-Dade County: PROTEST INFLUENCED MIAMI-DADE'S DECISION TO STOP RECOUNT ____________________________________________________________________ THE NEW YORK TIMES Politics Friday, November 24, 2000 http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/politics/24MIAM.html MIAMI-DADE COUNTY By DEXTER FILKINS and DANA CANEDY MIAMI, Nov. 23 - The Miami- Dade County Canvassing Board's decision on Wednesday to shut down its hand recount of presidential election ballots followed a rapid campaign of public pressure that at least one of the board's three members says helped persuade him to vote to stop the counting. Republican telephone banks had urged Republican voters in Miami to go to the Stephen P. Clark Government Center downtown to protest the recount, which began there on Monday and which Democrats hoped would help swing Florida's 25 electoral votes to Vice President Al Gore. The city's most influential Spanish-language radio station, Radio Mambi, called on staunchly Republican Cuban-Americans to head downtown to demonstrate. Republican volunteers shouted into megaphones urging protest. A lawyer for the Republican Party helped stir ethnic passions by contending that the recount was biased against Hispanic voters. The subsequent demonstrations turned violent on Wednesday after the canvassers had decided to close the recount to the public. Joe Geller, chairman of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, was escorted to safety by the police after a crowd chased him down and accused him of stealing a ballot. Upstairs in the Clark center, several people were trampled, punched or kicked when protesters tried to rush the doors outside the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections. Sheriff's deputies restored order. When the ruckus was over, the protesters had what they had wanted: a unanimous vote by the board to call off the hand counting. Only that morning, the board, facing a tight deadline mandated the night before by the State Supreme Court, had concluded that it did not have time for a hand count of all 654,000 ballots cast by the county's voters. So the canvassers voted to proceed only with a manual count of 10,750 ballots that machines had not counted. Now even that limited recount was being abandoned, a decision that brought whoops and applause from the crowd. After the charge on the elections office, and just before the vote calling off the entire manual count, the three canvassers were led by police escort back to the public recount area from the room where they had decided to conduct their tally shielded from public view. One nonpartisan member of the board, David Leahy, the supervisor of elections, said after the vote that the protests were one factor that he had weighed in his decision. "This was perceived as not being an open and fair process," Mr. Leahy said. "That weighed heavy on our minds." After discussing the matter briefly with reporters, Mr. Leahy declined requests for interviews, as did the two other board members, one of them nonpartisan, the other a Democrat. But quite apart from any campaign of pressure, the board did say that the court-mandated deadline had been a factor that militated against even a limited recount. Whatever the case, Democrats accused Bush supporters of gathering a crowd and riling it up in hopes of forcing the board to back down. "One hour they're telling us they're going to get it done," Luis Rosero, a Democratic aide, said of the canvassers, and "the next minute there were two riot situations and a crowd massing out in front. This was deliberate." Mr. Rosero said he had been punched and kicked by Republican supporters outside Mr. Leahy's office. Republican supporters scoffed at the accusation that they had engaged in a scheme of intimidation, saying the protest had been nothing more than a spontaneous manifestation of people's anger. "It's the same type of democracy in action when Jesse Jackson parachutes in and starts a protest in the black community," said Miguel De Grandy, a lawyer for the Republican Party. "People have a right to express their opinions." Yet some Bush supporters did acknowledge that they had helped inspire the crowd in hopes that the recount would end, though saying they had certainly meant no one any harm. "We were trying to stop the recount; Bush had already won," said Evilio Cepero, a reporter for Radio Mambi. "We were urging people to come downtown and support and protest this injustice." Mr. Cepero played a key role in the protests, roaming around the building outside and, with a megaphone, addressing a crowd of perhaps 150 people. "Denounce the recount!" he shouted repeatedly. "Stop the injustice!" He regularly cut into Radio Mambi's broadcasts to encourage people to come downtown. And he also phoned in interviews with two Republican lawmakers - United States Representatives Lincoln Diaz- Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, both Cuban-Americans - who also helped persuade people to come. Several people who attended the demonstration said they had decided to do so after receiving an automated phone message, initiated by local Republican officials, encouraging them. One was Rebecca Totilo, who came to the protest with her husband and four children, and carried a "Rotten to the Gore" poster. Republican supporters said the canvassing board had decided to reverse itself because it had acted illegally when it decided to hand-count Miami-Dade's ballots, not because of the protesters. They added that the canvassing board's members inflamed peaceful demonstrators when they decided to count the ballots in a room closed to the public. "People were pounding on the doors, but they had an absolute right to get in," said Mr. De Grandy, the Republican lawyer. Mr. De Grandy accused the canvassing board, all of whose members are non-Hispanic whites, of ethnic bias, saying that at one point it had intended to recount only those precincts that are not predominantly Hispanic. (The county as a whole is about 50 percent Hispanic.) The canvassers vigorously denied the accusation, saying they had initially intended to recount all of Dade's ballots and then, after the court had imposed its deadline, the 10,750 that had not been counted by the machines. Whatever problems the canvassing board encountered, Republicans said, it brought on itself. "Sure they were under pressure," said Paul Crespo, a Bush campaign worker. "They had taken so many illegal decisions that they were on the verge of provoking serious unrest." Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company ***** ____________________________________________________________________ RAGE SHARPENS CONSERVATIVE RHETORIC ____________________________________________________________________ THE WASHINGTON POST Nation and Politics Wednesday, November 22, 2000; Page A19 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49363-2000Nov21.html By Thomas B. Edsall Washington Post Staff Writer Conservative anger over the Florida recount has gained such intensity and momentum that leaders of the American right are now accusing Vice President Gore of trying to destroy democracy and mounting an illegal coup to take over the White House. With extraordinary speed, conservatives have demonized Gore as the epitome of the kind of venality and corruption they more typically ascribe to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Gore, in the words of the Weekly Standard, learned the lesson of impeachment that "taught the Democrats that they can get away with anything." Such anger is certain to intensify in the wake of last night's Florida Supreme Court ruling. The stalled outcome of the presidential election has tapped into the deeply held belief by conservatives that they won a strong mandate when the GOP captured both houses of Congress in 1994--but were frustrated by the political machinations of President Clinton. Now, they say, Gore is employing similar tactics to block George W. Bush's ascendancy to the White House. "Gore and Clinton have lost the democratic branches of government," said Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. "They know that in a fair fight, they will lose their presidency and they are retreating to their redoubt of trial lawyers and politicized judges." Marshall Wittmann, an analyst at the Hudson Institute who is relatively moderate in his views of the election dispute in Florida, said many of his colleagues on the political right are convinced that "there would have been a conservative ascendancy had not it been for the venality of the Clinton-Gore team. From the 1994 election to the government shutdown, through impeachment, to this point, it has been a seamless web, tied back to the 1992 Clinton campaign and Gennifer Flowers and draft-dodging--and Gore is viewed as the person spinning that web." From talk radio to cable television to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the howl of conservative pain and anger has steadily risen in pitch and volume. "This may be the worst thing I've ever seen," declared former education secretary William Bennett during a hostile brawl on CNN's "Capital Gang." "Al Gore is trying to steal this election." Rush Limbaugh, the king of conservative talk radio, described Gore as suffering from "an unquenchable thirst for power." Janet Parshall, a talk show host who shares many of Limbaugh's views, said in a CNN interview: "There's a movie opening this weekend called 'The Grinch Who Stole Christmas,' and some of my listeners are wondering if there are some grinches afoot that might steal an election" in a clear reference to the Gore campaign. Referring to Bush, she added, "But there's another movie that's out called 'Men of Honor.' " Not to be outdone, David Tell editorialized in the conservative Weekly Standard: "Al Gore's attempted coup has exactly tracked the trajectory of the Monica Lewinsky episode, his mentor's own triumph over ancient taboos of American public life. . . . Gore has pursued his goal with a speed and cynical genius that Bill Clinton never dreamed of." Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan declared: "The Gore-Clinton Democratic Party is trying to steal the election. . . . This crew we have now, Messrs. Gore and Clinton and their operatives, they seem, to my astonishment as an American, to be men who would never put their country's needs before their own if there were even the mildest of conflicts between the two. America is the platform of their ambitions, not the driving purpose of them." In two columns, George F. Will denounced Gore's Florida claims as "slow-motion larceny" and referred to the vice president's "serial mendacity." The "Clinton-Gore era culminates with an election as stained as the blue dress," Will wrote. "Consider his [Gore's] political ethics, which flow from his corrupting hunger for power." The left has not been lacking in hot rhetoric. Jesse L. Jackson compared the Florida recount to the voting rights struggle in Selma, Ala.: "We marched too much, bled too profusely and died too young. We must not surrender." And Democratic Gore supporters have not hesitated to attack Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Paul Begala has called her "a dilettante debutante Republican hack" and Democratic lawyer Alan Dershowitz said Harris is "a crook and an operative." But Democrats have offered little direct criticism of Bush that resembles the critique of Al Gore from the right. The conflict has changed the culture of the Washington media. Last weekend, CNN's "Capital Gang," the normally friendly show where journalists and politicians of the left and right voice their opinions of world events, turned into a hostile battleground. Bennett, author of "The Book of Virtues," declared the election would be "illegitimate if Al Gore becomes president." Bennett told the four-member panel of columnists: "If you don't call the kind the thuggish tactics that the Gore campaign is doing right now for what they are, I think the notion of objectivity in the media is gone." "I just cannot disagree more strenuously," countered liberal co-host Mark Shields. "Al Gore as we sit here leads in the national popular vote. Al Gore has more electoral votes than George W. Bush. There is no question that hand counting is more accurate than machine counting. . . . You can sit there from your Olympian perch and issue your moral thunderbolts." Later in the show, Bennett commented, "This may be my last appearance on the 'Capital Gang.' " Thomas Mann, a Brookings Institution political scientist, said conservative rhetoric has begun to approach "what we saw at the worst of the impeachment fervor, unbridled self-righteous defiance and venom, bordering on conservative McCarthyism with accusations of traitorous behavior." Bennett, Mann contended, "has lost his ability to be an arbiter of moral behavior. He's become a partisan in the worst sense of the word." Repeated attempts to contact Bennett over two days were unsuccessful. Mann said the intensity of the anti-Gore views may be related to the feeling among many conservatives that "the election would be a walk for Bush, that finally they would have unified Republican government and pursue the agenda that has been frustrated. And anything to frustrate that is obviously illegitimate." Tell, author of the Weekly Standard's outspoken editorial criticizing Gore, acknowledged that he may be only "one in a thousand" who sees the vice president's actions in strongly negative terms. He said the public is numb from repeated scandals: "Why are the peasants not in the streets with torches?" he asked rhetorically. "I would leave that to a sociologist." Copyright 2000 The Washington Post Company ***** ____________________________________________________________________ A STOLEN DEMOCRACY ____________________________________________________________________ By Mumia Abu-Jamal #481 Column Written 11/10/2000 Source: Mark Clement, MClement@bruderhof.com - Thursday, 23 November 2000 - I think the American public wants a solemn ass as a President and I think I'll go along with them. -- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) 30th U.S. President Americans, by the millions, went to their polling places, to participate in the political process. Notice, it was not said that they voted to elect a President, for they did not do so. People voted for electors, a mysterious bunch of virtually unknown political appointees, who will sit in state capitals and decide who will be the President and Vice-President of the United States. It is here that the Electoral College comes into play, a group of 538 people who will vote for who they want to be president. It matters not who millions of Americans thought they were voting for. The Electoral College votes for whomever they want, and their choice becomes the law. Indeed, according to broadcast and media reports, the Democratic Party candidate received a majority of the popular vote, and it appears the Republican candidate received more electoral votes. If that figure is affirmed and certified, then guess who gets sworn in in January, 2001? What kind of democracy is that? What it is, is American democracy. Who really cares if some 19,000 West Palm Beach registered voters had their ballots tossed out? One political spokesman, asked to comment on the possible disenfranchisement of over 19,000 voters, Haitians, Jews and African-Americans among them, replied, "Tough." That is American democracy. The nation that looks down its aquiline nose to Haiti, that lectures Nigeria on democracy, and spits on Cuba while boasting of the "free vote," is a democracy of thieves. So much for the lie that "every vote counts." Perhaps it should be said that every vote counted counts, eh? American history is not one of democracy, but of undemocracy, as women, Africans, Indians, and poor, unpropertied white men spent most of the nation's existence unable to vote. When mass protests forced laws opening up the vote, new means were found to suppress the vote of so-called "outsiders." The Electoral College is an institution constructed to protect the rulers from too much democracy by the ruled. It is to protect the powerful from the people. It is an institution that is profoundly undemocratic. In 1824, 1876, 1888, and now in 2000 the man who won the most popular votes lost the Electoral College tally, and thus the election. That's American history. That's American tradition. That's American democracy. 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