Remember Ohio, 2004?
The entire Republican state governement of Ohio was so corrupt that they were detroyed by scandal EVEN THOUGH THEY CONTROLED THE JUDICIARY and everything else! Same as on the national scale, where even though the GOP controlled the machinery of government, their corruption STILL brought down much of the leadership, and put much of the rest under a cloud.
And in this corrupt situation, the same guy, Blackwell, was entrusted with running BOTH the election AND Bush's campaign in Ohio, while GOP dominated firms were largely running the election, in terms of the machines, and local election boards were dominated by Blackwell's appointees and folks whose jobs were dependent on him. For Kerry to try to win in that situation was like going into a casino and hoping to beat the House. It could happen, but not likely.
Then when you look at the way the recount in Ohio was manhandled to the point of being meaningless, it's another piece of the puzzle. Some of the stories about what happened in the recount in Ohio are hair raising and some people even when to jail for it. There was one county where ballots were altered with stickers to get the numbers right during the recount. Can you believe that? Ballots were LITERALLY altered with stickers, according to several witnesses. You'd almost think the media would take an interest in something like that, wouldn't you? You'd almost think people would be up in arms. But nope. In another county, an ES&S (?) guy came in before the recount and monkeyed with the voting tabulator, removing part of it's insides and installing some new hardware, AND posted a cheat sheet, to help poll workers get the numbers to match during the 'recount'. What kind of recount is it where the machine is altered and a cheat sheet is posted? On and on the list of recount malfeasance goes.
And NOW many of the ballots and records are gone, even thought the courts ordered that they be preserved. A pot of coffee was spilled on one set, so they were all thrown out. Another bunch was destroyed in a leaky warehouse. Boy, those records were really well secured, weren't they? Tell me this widespread negligence/destruction of records doesn't look like the final piece of a nefarious puzzle.
If this story that I'm telling was some kind of crime drama, we'd all know what was going on and who the crooks are. But because it's in real life and a lot of folks have a stake in saying "move along, nothing to see here", we all close our eyes and pretend we can't see what's in front of our faces.
And what do we get for our complacency? We get a government that increasingly pays no attention to the people. You want out of Iraq? Too bad. You want an economy that's fairer to everybody? Too bad. You want Cheney impeached? Too bad.
And it ain't just the GOP. My Blue Dog congressman is all about pork. Give him his pork and he'll give the Pubs whatever they want. This weekend the Dems had the gall to pass one bill supposedly reforming government, while passing another bill that gave increased powers to Gonzales, a man who has been demonstrated to be either a crook, or incompetent, or both, and who has been shown to have corrupted the DOJ. THE DOJ!! There is no more important federal department!
The people on both sides of the aisle in the Beltway think we citizens are a bunch of idiots. They can do whatever they want, with barely any smoke and mirrors even, and we'll all just sit on our couches and at our computers pleasantly nodding.
Will we?
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