[Peace-discuss] Was the election stolen?

[C. G. Estabrook]

Phil--

I think your general argument here is quite correct and well-put, except
for what's essentially a footnote: I think you misinterpret Alex
Cockburn's remarks. He's quite far from making "excuses for the
Democrats."  He has in fact excoriated them in a series of columns
(available at counterpunch.org), to the point that our own Mort Brussel
accused him of Schadenfreude at the Democrats' disarray.  I think Mort's
view is at least overstated, but it's true that Cockburn has condemned not
only the Democrats but also the "safe-state" strategy, because of his
contempt for the party and its candidate.

The point Cockburn makes in the passage you quote is simply the undeniable
one that the Republicans were able to gay-bait the Democrats in this
election as they once Red-baited them (e.g., "Who lost China?" and
McCarthy's "Twenty years of treason" -- i.e. the New Deal.)

And BTW, I once went looking for a source for the oft-repeated Niemoeller
quote -- and was never able to find it.  But it's good enough that, if he
didn't say it, he should have.

Best, Carl


On Sun, 7 Nov 2004, Phil Stinard wrote:

> At tonight's AWARE meeting, David (at least I think it was David),
> suggested that time be set aside to discuss the US election, and
> whether the vote was stolen.  For various reasons, there was no time
> for this, so since I'm all primed and ready to go, I'll continue the
> conversion on the Peace-Discuss List.
> 
> To discuss whether the election was stolen, one must first answer the
> question, "Stolen from whom?"  Since I didn't vote for Kerry, and
> since I'm confident that my write-in vote for Ralph Nader was duly
> counted (there were three Nader votes in Urbana 2, and I know one of
> the other two Nader voters), I don't feel that my vote was stolen.  
> However, I understand that there are some embittered Kerry voters who
> feel that their vote WAS stolen because Kerry didn't win.  I put in
> that last clause intentionally, because had Kerry won, I doubt that
> few Kerry supporters would be complaining about fraud or stolen votes.  
> My view is that there is a certain amount of fraud, discarded votes,
> and disenfranchisement in every election, and that this election was
> no worse than any other, and yet, it is only the loser in a close race
> who cries fraud, or more precisely, the supporters of the loser who
> cry fraud, because Kerry himself is rather silent on the subject.  At
> the November 3 post-election meeting held at the IMC, I was one of the
> few people in the room who said that their major concern after the
> election is making sure that everyone's vote is counted.  For those
> interested in fair elections, the top priority MUST be election
> reform.  I don't see that coming from either of the two major parties.  
> Gosh, I wonder why?  Maybe it's because that's how they get elected.  
> If you want to see an example of how to run a fair and honest election
> that meets even ex-President Carter's standards, look no further than
> Venezuela's August 15 referendum on Hugo Chavez's presidency.  It was
> run using state-of-the-art electronic voting machines with something
> like seven levels of security, and the machines printed paper receipts
> that the voter inspected, and then placed into a secure ballot box to
> be used should a manual recount be required.  There was almost nothing
> about this in the English language press--I translated and/or wrote
> some of the few articles that are available in English about those
> machines.  That election took only a few months to set up.  We have
> four years.  The clock is ticking.
> 
> If I remember my death-and-dying correctly, Elisabeth Kubler Ross said
> that the first stage of grief is denial.  That explains Greg Palast's
> claim of a stolen election, ending with his illogical but dramatic
> conclusion that he didn't leave his country, his country left him
> (which if taken out of context would seem to be the last stage of
> grieving, acceptance that maybe more people did vote for Bush than for
> Kerry, although that was not his intent).
> 
> The Democrats who didn't follow Kerry's lead and support Bush after
> the election have been doing a lot of agonizing over how they "lost"
> the election.  Sharon Smith provides an excellent analysis of what
> went wrong for Democrats and progressives in her article "The
> Self-Fulfilling Prophesy of Lesser Evilism"
> (http://www.counterpunch.org/smith11042004.html).  I wanted to point
> out Alexander Cockburn's analysis from Counterpunch, though, as an
> example of how far people will go to make excuses for the Democrats:
> 
> "The Democrats spent the year wasting money and passion attacking
> Ralph Nader whose early predictions of his ultimate drawing power at
> the polls turned out to be on the money. If the Democrats had wanted
> to identify a serious saboteur of their chances they should have homed
> in on Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco whose okay to gay marriage
> saw all those same sex couples on the steps of City Hall embracing, on
> every front page and nightly news in America. Ohio had its proposition
> banning gay marriage and the drive to put it on the ballot and push it
> to victory brought the Christians out in their hundreds of thousands,
> marching to the polls across the rubble of their state's economy."
> 
> It was Ralph Nader last time, and now that they have elimated him as a
> threat, their next target is gays, and you have people like Alexander
> Cockburn cheering the effort with hyperbolic excess.  It reminds me of
> Martin Niemoeller's poem on victims of the Nazi regime:
> 
> ?First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I
> did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade
> Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came
> for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when
> they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.?
> 
> Well, I'm going to speak out, and this is only the beginning.  I urge
> everyone to keep a close eye on both parties the next time around, and
> don't blindly support the Democrats just because they're not
> Republicans.  The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.
> 
> --Phil
> 
>