As Suspicions Mount, the Daydream Mandate Recedes

Thom Hartmann’s latest article in Common Dreams, “Evidence Mounts That the Vote was Hacked” makes a compelling case for the horrorshow story Randi Rhodes has been been trumpeting all the livelong week on Air America, fearlessly, relentlessly, and almost all by her lonesome.

What do I think of all this?

Of course Bush stole this election, just as he did the one before. The artificially long lines, the campaign of insinuations facilitated by conservative media at the end of which citizens voted for candidates who opposed their own espoused positions on multiple issues or through which millions were completely mislead about vital and almost universally substantiated facts (no WMD, no Iraq-9/11 connection, unfundated mandates, devastating environmental policies, rampant unaccountability and secrecy, unprecedented cronyism and graft, etc.), and all this dickering about with paper trails, exit-polls, profiling, intimidation, challenges and caging lists, dirty tricks and the rest....

It is true, the theft is less conspicuous and less dramatic than the one abetted by the Supreme Court's outrageous criminal conduct last time around. It bespeaks deeper systemic frailties this time that are often hard to grasp or substantiate.

The particular case for fraud that is starting, finally but almost certainly too late, to acquire more mainstream attention is in fact the iceberg tip of a larger swarming mess of institutionalized disenfranchisement on which the New Republicans have relied to maintain their oil-slicked grip on power.

These death-cult money-lusting New Republican evangelicals (not to put too fine a point on it) may howl with derision at the pathetic conspiracy theorists and whiny sore losers of the left. But even if the specific contours of the case as it is getting traction in the media don’t add up perfectly, even if the breadth of theft cannot surmount the Boy-King’s squeaky-tight non-mandate, the bottom line is that this is the story that has emerged as the one through which the undeniable larger reality of epic disenfranchisement, general criminality and election fraud, and utter illegitimacy of this moment in our fragile democratic Nation’s history is expressing itself.

Market libertarians say taxes are theft, social libertarians say property is theft, and liberal democrats in Bush's America say the election was theft. None of it, I suppose, is true the way simple truths of the matter are sometimes true (when we are lucky), but it speaks to a deeper complex violation of legitimacy that is as true as can be.

I understand those who worry this discourse of election-stealing is irresponsible, but it seems to me any silent acquiescence to illegitimacy on so many levels as this is incomparably more damaging and irresponsible. And those really do seem to be the options on offer, unfortunately.

No doubt it is too little, too late, incomplete, impertinent, and vulnerable to ridicule. Nevertheless, the ozone stench of this story should shroud this sleazy second term like a personal stormcloud from now to the mid-term elections, whereupon we ride the stormfront on to a well-deserved impeachment soon thereafter.