The Gulliberal Problem

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S

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 05:39:31 EST

The Gulliberal Problem

 

 

 

As someone said (I forget who, maybe it was me LOL) --

 

WHAT PART OF " DIEBOLD IS HACKABLE " DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?

 

One person can hack the vote, turn an election upside down -----

UNDETECTED. Are you getting this? S....

 

 

 

The Gulliberal Problem

January 17, 2005

By Ernest Partridge, The Crisis Papers

 

 

We've got trouble enough from our adversaries †" but God save us from

our friends!

Surely one of the most amazing aspects of the election fraud issue is

how so many otherwise smart liberals and progressives fail to see what

is right in front of their faces; namely that the key Congressional

races in 2002 were stolen, that the 2004 Presidential election was

stolen, and that, if business as usual prevails, the elections of 2006

and 2008 will be stolen. The voting machines are built by major Bush

contributors, his " pioneers, " and their employees write the secret

software and count the votes. When asked to provide proof that the

vote totals are accurate, they can supply no proof, simply because

that's the way the machines are built and the software is written.

" Trust us! " is the only " proof " that they can offer.

 

And so, when, before the 2004 election, the CEO of Diebold, Walden

O'Dell, announced that he would do " all in his power " to " deliver " the

deciding Ohio electoral votes to Bush, few in the mainstream media or

the Democratic party seemed to notice, or care, that he could " deliver

Ohio " in total disregard of what the voters in Ohio might want, or how

they might vote.

 

Meet the " gulliberals " (pronounced GULlibruls): prominent Democrats,

liberals, and progressives who have ears to hear but hear not, eyes to

see but see not, and brains to understand but will not. Included among

the gulliberals are Al Franken, Paul Begala, Arianna Huffington, David

Corn, Bernie Sanders, some writers for Salon.com and Mother Jones;

admirable individuals all, who are laboring valiantly to overthrow the

GOP in the next (alleged) election. Yet they are also unwitting allies

with the Republican National Committee, as they say, with the GOP,

" the elections were honest, so get over it! "

 

Add to the roster of the gulliberals, every Democrat in the Senate,

and with the honorable exception of Rush Holt, John Conyers, the

Congressional Black Caucus, and a very few others, virtually every

Democrat in the House. Also such allied organizations such as People

for the American Way and MoveOn. All these prattle on about how we

must all work together to take over the Congress " next time, " as if

they were preparing for and facing a fair contest.

 

So once again, Lucy props up the football, and says, " c'mon, Charlie

Brown, let's see if you can kick it this time. "

 

What's wrong with these people?

 

Don't they know how to recognize simple evidence? Can't they follow an

uncomplicated argument to its compelling conclusion? Answer: yes they

know, and yes they can. They just refuse to do so. My best guess is

that they simply can't bring themselves to face up to the enormity of

the Bush/GOP crime against our democracy.

 

Germany, c. 1938: " Yes, I know things are tough for us Jews, but

surely things can't get much worse than this. After all, this is our

country too! " Some of those who believed that things could get worse

and who acted accordingly are now, along with their descendants, our

neighbors and compatriots. Those who " couldn't believe, " perished in

the Holocaust.

 

How, then are we to get through to the gulliberals? With two simple

questions, asked over and over, and over again until they finally face

up to them:

 

1. Can you prove that the elections of 2000, 2002 and 2004 were not

stolen?

 

2. Can your refute the evidence that these elections were stolen?

 

Name-calling ( " paranoid, " " conspiracy theorists " ) does not count as

evidence.

In point of fact: (1) there is no proof that the elections were, or

will be, honest; not even if they were, in fact, honest, simply

because that's the way the machines and software are designed. This

conclusion is supported by an October, 2005 report from none other

than the non-partisan Government Accountability Office †" a report

virtually ignored by the mainstream media. (2) The evidence of fraud

is overwhelming.

 

University Statistics professors such as Drs. Steven Freeman, Arlene

Ash, Ron Baiman, and, many more put the odds of a fair and accurate

vote count in 2004 at millions to one, in effect, impossible. So too

the thirty-plus percentage public opinion swings in the 2005 Ohio

election that sunk three ballot reform initiatives. What part of the

meaning of " impossible " do the gulliberals not understand? Add to this

the demonstrable ability of hackers to alter e-vote totals without

leaving the trace. One such demonstration by Bev Harris was conducted

with DNC Chair Howard Dean on CNBC. Another took place last month in

Florida, leading to the decertification of touch-screen machines in

two counties. There is much more evidence that I have cited many times

before, but quite frankly all this repetition is getting tedious. So

once again, read it yourself here, here, here, and here.

 

All this leads to a compelling question: just how much weight of

evidence is required to budge the gulliberals from their obstinate

denial? Might it perhaps be comparable to the evidence required to

convince Pat Robertson of Darwinism, Jerry Falwell of the fallibility

of The Bible, or George Bush that God did not tell him to invade Iraq

†" which is to say, no amount of evidence at all?

 

Let us hope not. After all, most of the prominent gulliberals are

educated and otherwise reasonable individuals. So we must put on the

pressure. Call into the Franken Show. Write Arianna, and send comments

to The Huffington Post. Write your Congressperson, the DNC and your

local media. Hit them with these questions. And then come back and hit

them again. But don't expect much help from the media, at least not

right away. We must direct most of our fire at the gulliberals. They

mean well, and they want to oust the Busheviks as much as we do. So

they are persuadable. Demand that they confront the evidence and

either refute it or sign up with the election reform movement.

 

For if the Republicans and their allies in the privatized election

industry can, once again, " program " any election result that they want

and leave no trace of the crime, all talk of winning in November is

futile, and all money and effort devoted to that result is wasted. The

Republicans will win again, no matter what the public might want.

If we managed to crawl out of this hole before November, 2006 and take

back our Congress, this is how it might happen:

 

The mainstream media will continue to lose its credibility, as more

and more of our compatriots match the official propaganda against

their personal experiences and memories. Colin Powell at the UN and

the " Winnebagos of Death. " " Mission accomplished! " The WMDs (Rumsfeld:

" We know where they are " ). The " reconstituted nukes " (Cheney: " there

is no doubt " ). The smoking gun as a mushroom cloud. " Greeted with

flowers and candies. " Judith Miller's dispatches from Ahmed Chalabi.

Bob Woodward's indulgent portraits of " our Commander in Chief. "

 

For the vast majority of Americans, economic conditions are bound to

get worse, sooner rather than later. Fewer and fewer will be able to

afford health insurance, or be able to send their children to college.

The value of their homes, their only reserve, will collapse. They will

begin to feel the loss of their accustomed liberties as they will no

longer write, send e-mails, use the telephone, buy books or use their

public libraries with assurance of their privacy.

 

News of the Abramoff and other scandals will intensify, and we haven't

heard the last of Patrick Fitzgerald's Plamegate investigations. The

public will come to realize that there is simply no way to " win " the

Iraq war, as the casualty figures will continue to mount up. Amidst

all this, American citizens will remember what it was like to live in

a country that was free, prosperous, and at peace. There is only so

much that Fox News, MSNBC, right-wing talk radio, and a compliant

mainstream media can do to cover-up the disastrous consequences of the

Bush policies. At long last, it is not enough.

 

As a result of all this, it will become ever-more " fashionable " for

ordinary citizens to criticize and ridicule Bush, and his favorability

ratings will soon resume their inexorable downward plunge. More and

more, we will hear the question, " how in the world did we elect and

then re-elect this clown, along with those brigands in the Congress? "

An agreeable answer will then be close at hand: " we didn't! " The

election fraud issue might then break out into the open and overcome

the mainstream media's determination to suppress and ignore it.

 

Today, we see harbingers of that breakthrough. The pressure of public

opinion is building up under the lid of the media blackout. In the

year following the 2000 election, the Gallup Poll found that from 15

to 24 percent of the public believed that Bush had stolen the

election, and the CBS/ New York Times poll reported that barely more

than half believed that Bush was legitimately elected in 2000. Doubts

about the legitimacy of the election process have not gone away, and

in fact were boosted by the 2004 election. Occasionally late-night TV

comedians make jokes about it, a dangerous trend for the GOP, given

that most Americans seem to get their " news " from David Letterman, Jay

Leno, Jon Stewart, et al. Now and then a maverick pundit or

commentator such as Keith Olbermann mentions the issue in the MSM. In

short, there is within the American public an indelible residue of

skepticism and distrust persisting from the 2000 and the 2004

elections. The mainstream media and the GOP can try to suppress it,

but they can't eliminate it. Sadly and ironically in this effort they

are joined by the gulliberals.

 

Strange to say, those of us who are struggling to expose the great

election fraud may be joined by an improbable ally: a small but

significant fraction of the financial and corporate elites. For it may

finally be dawning on some of the poobahs on Wall Street, and through

them a few significant voices in the mainstream media, that they are

sinking the ship that they are riding on. And that when the great ship

goes down, those in the luxury cabins will be as doomed as those in

steerage.

 

Bush's " pioneers " are, in their own way, as blind to the economic

shipwreck ahead as the gulliberals are to election fraud. But the

evidence in both cases is compelling. The housing bubble is about to

burst, consumer credit is almost maxed-out and a sharp drop in

consumer spending is certain to follow, China is abandoning the

dollar, we are at peak oil and energy prices are bound to skyrocket.

And the 95% of humanity living outside our borders has just about had

it with our imperial fantasies and may, at any time, decide to shut

down our economy without firing a shot. Europe, OPEC and the Pacific

Rim can do it, and they know that they can, even if the Busheviks do not.

 

All this is slowly dawning on a few fat-cat movers and shakers, a very

few of whom might appreciate that all their wealth is derived,

ultimately, from the education, skill and labor of the rest of us, and

from our shared infrastructure, institutions, and political

traditions, most notably, the rule of law - all of which are being

outsourced, dismantled, and " drowned " in Grover Norquist's " bathtub. "

The recent impeachment editorial in Barrons may be a harbinger of this

realization among a few of the elites.

 

And so, where the law, the Constitution, simple justice and morality

have failed, enlightened self-interest by the powerful and wealthy may

yet come to our aid. If and when these powers-that-be finally decide

to pull the plug on Bush, Inc., they can bring it down, just as they

did to Nixon, Inc. They can do so simply by spreading the word, far

and wide, that since 2000 (and perhaps before) elections have been

irrelevant and that the regime no longer governs " with the consent of

the governed. " These elites, unlike us, have the media access and

control to do just that.

 

While none of this is inevitable, all of it is possible. But only if

the people act. To accomplish all this we will need the help of the

gulliberals, which means that they must be persuaded to abandon their

fantasy of honest elections.

 

But will they wake up in time to rescue our common political-economic

enterprise? That's where we the public, and particularly those of us

who labor in the progressive blogosphere, come in. Our voices of

protest are weak, but they are grounded in evidence and hard reality.

Once again, the elements of the election fraud issue are exceedingly

simple: (1) the advocates of paperless e-voting cannot prove that the

citizen's vote is secure, and (2) those advocates have no plausible

rebuttal to the readily available evidence, noted above, that recent

national elections have been stolen. It's as simple as that.

 

In a perversion of our democracy, private citizens and citizen

organizations have had to take up the burden of proving that their

franchise is corrupt. This is not how it should be in a healthy

democracy. It should not be the obligation of the citizen to secure

his or her vote; instead, that citizen should have a right to a secure

ballot †" a right guaranteed by that citizen's government, and

enforced by the rule of law. Thanks to the Busheviks and the GOP

establishment, we do not have this right, and so we must seize it back

from the privatized " election industry. "

 

To do this, we must write and publish relentlessly, organize, talk to

all and any who will listen, and perhaps a few that won't. We must

wake up our sleeping and credulous " allies " the gulliberals, tell the

Democrats that they will get no support from us unless and until they

address and deal with the ballot fraud issue, and we must encourage,

support, and publicize any defections from Bushism in the media and

among the affluent elites.

 

As I have noted many times before and will say once again, the

Busheviks and their allies have the wealth and the power, and they

control the message. Thus the cause of we dissidents is hopeless: as

hopeless as the causes of General George Washington, of Mohandas

Gandhi, of Nelson Mandela, of Andrei Sakharov, of Martin Luther King.

Somehow, mysteriously, unexpectedly, the forces of history provided

opportunities, and these great men had the wisdom to identify and to

take advantage of these opportunities. While I find no leaders of such

stature and wisdom in evidence today, crises have a way of producing

such leaders. Now is the time for them to step forward, as those

opportunities now come before us.

 

-------------

" The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. " (Martin

Luther King).

Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field

of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He publishes the website,

The Online Gadfly and co-edits the progressive website, The Crisis

Papers. He is at work on a book, Conscience of a Progressive, which

can be seen in-progress here. Send comments to: crisispapers.

 

 

 

***

" It's amazing I won. I was running against peace, prosperity and

incumbency "

 

George W. Bush in Sweden, June 14th 2001, speaking to the Prime

Minister, unaware that a live TV camera was still running.

 

 

*****

 

HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS