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October 09, 2003
So it's Thursday, and the
So it's Thursday, and the great farce that was the California recall has faded into shameful history. The latest in a series of Republican-orchestrated coup d'etats in America has now been effected.
It's a disturbing and frankly disgusting pattern of behavior we've seen over and over again from Republicans over the last ten years. When Republicans can't win elections according to the rules of democracy set forth in the Constitution, they stoop to obscure parliamentary procedures and unorthodox, little-used provisions to overturn elections they wanted to win. Think about it - there had only been one impeachment trial in the 210 years of the Constitution of the United States of America... until, that is, the Republicans lost an election in 1996 that they thought they should have won. Unable to accept that the voters REJECTED their agenda, the GOP then spent $52 million of your money and mine launching investigation after investigation at Bill Clinton, wasting taxpayer money prosecuting the White House Travel Office; whipping up unfounded and meritless innuendo about the death of Vince Foster; trying despite all the evidence to find Clintonian wrongdoing in Whitewater, and finally a lurid exploration of the president's sex life. Of course, Clinton was stupid enough to hand them the sex scandal rope to hang him with - but that doesn't mean the Republicans weren't still looking for a lynching.
In 2000, George W. Bush LOST the election. Pure and simple. The Bush team was so sure they were going to win the popular vote but lose the electoral that they began piping off to the New York Daily News about strategies to overcome the 'subversion of the people's will' - they were going to argue that the popular vote and not the electoral should count. (Check the NY Daily News from 11/1/00 if you don't believe me.) When they lost the popular vote and were losing the electoral as well... they resorted to manipulating the results in a state under Bush family control - using their lapdog secretary of state to refuse to allow some votes to be counted, engaging in abject fraud in some places (Palm Beach County), and demonstrating denial in textbook fashion. Then, when despite all of the Bush machinations, it looked like he was STILL going to lose, the Republicans turned to their hand-installed members of the Supreme Court to make sure that W got what the people didn't want to give him.
In California in 2002, Republican prospects should have been good. An unpopular and incompetent Democratic governor facing a budget shortfall and a utility crisis - he should have been easy picking. But the Republicans rejected a centrist member of their own party in the primary, in favor of someone who more closely toed their broderline religious facism line. Quite properly, the voters of California rejected the extremist Republican agenda and re-elected Gray Davis despite his incompetence. But yet again, as they have time and time again, Republicans refused to accept their lawful defeat. A handful of rich Republicans (there are only two types of Republican: the I-got-mine rich ones, and the Christian Moraliy Police) paid enough people off that they were basically able to say, "Do-over." They undid the democratically expressed wishes of the people of California by buying a recall vote and then propping up an empty headed actor with no specific ideas as their figurehead.
The tragic irony is that impeachment and recall were set up and instituted specifically to protect Americans from extreme abuses of power and criminal misuse of political office - there is a reason there has only been one president impeached and one governor ever recalled. Sadly, today these tools are misused as simple means to the end of usurping power - they are the hammer and scythe of extremists looking to abuse power and criminally misuse political office. The Republican Party has subverted democracy three times now in the last 6 years - and let's not even get into the criminal and unconstitutional redistricting stunts that Tom DeLay is orchestrating in Texas. They are responsible for unconsitutional seizures of power, or attempts at it - all because they cannot and will not accept that the American voter does not want to follow their radically reactionary agenda of social & religious totalitarianism combined with economic oligopoly. This party has strayed from its roots as Lincoln's party of freedom - it is now the party that has done everything but seize power at the barrel of a gun... and I wouldn't put it past them to try. They've already shown utter disdain for democracy and traditions of free choice in America, so why wouldn't they toss the last vestige of democracy away?
The Republican Party of 2003 poses no less a threat to the security and long-term well being of the United States of America than the Communist Party of Stalin posed to Russia in the 1930s, or than the Nazi Party posed to Germany in 1933. They are the moral and ethical equivalents of these totalitarian regimes, and George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and the rest are our very own despots. They ought to be tried for treason, if the spirit of democracy were being upheld. At the very least, they must be stopped, for the good of our country.
