Polls show a double-digit public preference for the Democrats over the GOP in the upcoming mid-term congressional election. But no matter. Should sixty percent of the voters - or seventy or eighty - vote for the Democrats, the GOP will maintain control. "What matters," Stalin is reported to have said, "is not who votes, what matters is who counts the votes."
In the United States of America today, the Republicans, through their subsidiary private corporations, count the votes, and there is overwhelming evidence that in the past three national elections the Republicans have counted the votes to their advantage in utter disregard of the actual will of the voters. This in addition to the indisputable suppression of Democratic votes through registration purges, maldistribution of voting machines, and invalidation of ballots. The mainstream media and the Democratic Party refuse to acknowledge, investigate, or report, this massive crime against our democracy. But the evidence is what it is, and "facts," as John Adams observed, "are stubborn things and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts "
Thus the state of US politics has been radically changed. The United States can no longer correctly be described as a "democracy" - not as long as the government continues to rule without the consent of the governed and is no longer subject to recall by the voters.
The march toward dictatorship.
Meanwhile, the Busheviks are systematically dismantling the Constitutional system of checks and balances. With his "signing statements," Bush has announced his self-enacted privilege to ignore acts of Congress at will and thus to reduce the Congress to an advisory body.
With that much accomplished, the Busheviks now apparently have the Supreme Court in their sights. In a bill soon to be submitted to Congress, Bush will attempt to nullify the Hamden Decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions, which have the full force of U.S. law, apply to so-called "enemy combatants" (a term with no meaning or standing in either federal or international law). Under the provisions of this bill, writes Anne Plummer Flaherty of the Associated Press:
US citizens suspected of terror ties might be detained indefinitely and barred from access to civilian courts...
According to the draft, the military would be allowed to detain all "enemy combatants" until hostilities cease. The bill defines enemy combatant as anyone "engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners who has committed an act that violates the law of war and this statute."
Legal experts said ... that such language is dangerously broad and could authorize the military to detain indefinitely U.S. citizens who had only tenuous ties to terror networks like al Qaeda.
In fact, according to provisions of the Patriot Act, individuals engaged in acts of civil disobedience might be treated as "terrorists" and deprived of their Constitutional rights of habeas corpus, jury trial, and representation by counsel. Under this interpretation, Martin Luther King, Daniel Ellsberg, and thousands of Viet Nam era protesters could have been subject to arbitrary arrest and unlimited incarceration. An "enemy combatant" is whoever Bush's administration says that it is, and let us remember that soon after 9/11 Bush proclaimed that "you are either for us or against us."
If this "terror detainee bill" is enacted into law, the only remaining defense against totalitarian despotism will be free speech, as guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. But as we know, most of the mainstream media have fallen into line behind the Bush Administration and the GOP, and the independence of the remaining free medium, the internet, is now being threatened by pending legislation which would, in effect, privatize the internet and place it under the control of GOP subservient corporations.
The stakes in the coming election.
In the history of the United States, transfer of political power has almost always been peaceful and orderly. The defeated President rides with the President-Elect to the inauguration ceremony and then retires without incident. So it was in 1977, in 1981, and again in 1992 and 2001. In Congress, when control passes to a new majority party, the gavel is ceremoniously handed over to the new Speaker of the House or President of the Senate.
This time, however, control of the Congress will not be easily relinquished to the Democrats. The stakes in the November election are simply too great. Laws have been broken by the Republican Administration, and corruption in the GOP Congress is widespread, all the while Congressional oversight has been effectively abandoned. Billions of dollars of ill-gained fortunes are at stake - fortunes obtained by an unprecedented raid on the public treasury, by non-competitive government contracts, by tax loopholes, and by a flagrantly unjust realignment of the tax burden. Federal and international laws against torture have been violated and war crimes have been committed. And massive election fraud has gone on, uninvestigated and unprosecuted.
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