The US Is Not A Democratic Republic
By Randy Edwards

[*] Fall 2004 preface: When I wrote this article in early 2003, Michael Moore was well-known but nowhere as controversial as he is now. Moore's new notariety due to his documentary "Fahrenheit 911" has caused some to disregard the below excerpt simply due to its author. Sorry, that is just stupid -- it's a case of shooting the messenger. As a former history teacher and college professor I have researched Moore's claims and can state that Moore's sources are solid. The facts he presents and the anecdotal stories he tells are true and are based on mainstream sources (mainly Florida and national newspapers and the BBC). Additionally, the issues discussed have been corroborated by other media sources. You may disagree with Moore's commentary and his conclusions, but his facts are as valid as they get.[*]

We're taught that Americans are militantly fair and are committed to democracy. We're also taught that our American media is unbiased, fair, and aggressive at getting at the truth. The presidential elections of November 2000 proved all that to be wrong in the most brutal way. Most people are aware that Al Gore got more than 1/2 million votes across the nation than did George Bush. Personally I find it puzzling that most people are aware of this but few are strongly advocating getting rid of our antiquated and undemocratic Electoral College.

If you were to ask most Americans why some people feel that George Bush stole the presidential election of November 2000, you'll get back stories about "hanging chads" -- exactly what the corporate mass media has taught people.

But there is far, far more to the story. When I first talked to people about some of the lesser known but more dastardly details of the election people thought I was crazy -- no, it was about hanging chads they told me. The more I talked, they started to get an idea that there was more to the story.

One of the best summaries I've read about the presidential election of 2000 was written by Michael Moore in his book Stupid White Men. Moore is passionate about the topic, and he's definitely opinionated. But the stories told, the facts included, one cannot argue with. If you doubt what is below, then I urge you tobuy the book or to get it from your local library -- in the appendix of the book citations are given from major sources for each fact claimed and story told. The book's details:

Title: Stupid White Men
Author: Michael Moore
Publisher: ReganBooks, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 0-06-039245-2

I've read many reviews from this popular book, and it's spent weeks on the New York Times non-fiction best seller's list. But in none of those reviews do the reviewers dare to go into detail about the election. And if you haven't noticed, our corporate mass media has shown little interest in analyzing the botched election. The following block quote is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Stupid White Men:

We are now finally no better than a backwater banana republic. We are asking ourselves why any of us should bother to get up in the morning to work our asses off to produce goods and services that only serve to make the junta and its cohorts in Corporate America (a separate, autonomous fiefdom within the United States that has been allowed to run on its own for some time) even richer. Why should we pay our taxes to finance their coup? Can we ever again send our sons off into battle to give their lives defending "our way of life" -- when all tht really means is the lifestyle of the gray old men holed up in the headquarters they seized by the Potomac?

Oh JesusMaryAndJoseph, I can't take it! Somebody pass me the universal remote! I need to switch back to the fairy tale that I was a citizen in a democracy with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals. The story I was told as a child said that I mattered, that I was equal to every one of my fellow citizens -- and that not a single one of us was to be treated differently or unfairly, that no one was to weild power over others without their consent. The will of the people. America the Beautiful. Land that I love. Twighlight's...last...gleaming. Oh, say, can you see -- are the Belgian peacekeepers on their way? Hurry!

The coup began long before the shenanigans on Election Day 2000. In the summer of 1999 Katherine Harris, an honorary Stupid White Man who was both George W. Bush's presidential campaign cochairwoman and the Florida secretary of state in charge of elections, paid $4 million to Database Technologies to go through Florida's voter rolls and remove anyone "suspected" of being a former felon. She did so with the blessing of the governor of Florida, George W.'s brother Jeb Bush -- whose own wife was caught by immigration officials trying to sneak $19,000 worth of jewelry into the country without declaring and paying tax on it ... a felony in its own right. But hey, this is America. We don't prosecute felons if they're rich or married to a governing Bush.

The law states that ex-felons cannot vote in Florida. And sadly (though I'm confident that Florida's justice system was always unimpeachably fair), that means that 31 percent of all black men in Florida are prohibited from voting because they have a felony on their record. Harris and Bush knew that removing the names of ex-felons from the voter rolls would keep thousands of black citizens out of the voting booth.

Black Floridians, overwhelmingly, are Democrats -- and sure enough, Al Gore received the votes of more than 90 percent of them on November 7, 2000.

That is, 90 percent of those who were allowed to vote.

In what appears to be a mass fraud committed by the state of Florida, Bush, Harris, and company not only removed thousands of black felons from the rolls, they also removed thousands of black citizens who had never committed a crime in their lives -- along with thousands of eligible voters who had committed only misdemeanors.

How did this happen? Harris's office told Database -- a firm with strong Republican ties -- to cast as wide a net as possible to get rid of these voters. Her minions instructed the company to include even people with "similar" names to those of the actual felons. They insisted Database check people with the same birth dates as known felons, or similar Social Security numbers; an 80 percent match of relevant information, the election office instructed, was sufficient for Database to add a voter to the ineligible list.

These orders were shocking, even to Bush-friendly Database. They would mean that thousands of legitimate voters might be barred from voting on Election Day just because they had a name that sounded like someone else's, or shared a birthday with some unknown bank robber. Marlene Thorogood, the Database project manager, sent an E-mail to Emmett "Bucky" Mitchell, a lawyer for Katherine Harris's election division, warning him that "Unfortunately, programming in this fashion may supply you with false positives," or misidentifications.

Never mind that, said ol' Bucky. His response: "Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren't matches and let [county election] supervisors make a final determination rather than exclude certain matches altogether."

Database did as they were told. And before long 173,000 registered voters in Florida were permanently wiped off the voter rolls. In Miami-Dade, Florida's largest county, 66 percent of the voters who were removed were black. In Tampa's county, 54 percent of those who would be denied the right to vote on November 7, 2000, were black.

But culling names from Florida's records alone was not enough for Harris and her department. Eight thousand additional Floridians were thrown off the voting rolls because Database used a false list supplied by another state, a state which claimed that all of the names on the list were former convicted felons who had since moved to Florida.

It turns out that the felons on the list had served their time and had all their voting privileges reinstated. And there were others on the list who had committed only misdemeanors -- such as parking violations or littering. What state was it that offered Jeb and George a helping hand by sending this bogus list to Florida?

Texas.

This entire incident stunk to the high heavens, but the American media ignored it. It took the British Broadcasting Corporation to dig deep into this story, running fifteen-minute segments on its prime-time news program revealing all the sordid details and laying responsibility for the scam right on the doorstep of Governor Jeb Bush. It's a sad day when we have to look to a country 5,000 miles away to find out the truth about our own elections. (Eventually the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post picked up the story, but it received little attention.)

This assault on the voting rights of minorities was so widespread in Florida that it even affected people like Linda Howell. Linda received a letter informing her that she was a felon -- and therefore advising her not to bother showing up on Election Day, because she would be barred from voting. The only problem was Linda Howell wasn't a felon -- in fact, she was the elections supervisor of Madison County, Florida! She and other local election officials tried to get the state to rectify the problem, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. They were told that everyone who complained about being prevented from voting should submit themselves for fingerprinting -- and then let the state determine whether or not they were felons.

On November 7, 2000, as black Floridians flocked to the polls in record numbers, many were met at the ballot boxes with a blunt rebuke: "You cannot vote." In a number of precincts in Florida's inner cities, the polling locations were heavily fortified with police to block anyone on Katherine and Jeb's "felons list" from voting. Hundreds of law-abiding citizens looking to exercise their constitutional right to vote, mostly in black and Hispanic communities, were sent away -- and threatened with arrest if they protested.

George W. Bush would officially be credited with receiving 537 more votes than Al Gore in Florida. Is it safe to assume that the thousands of registered black and Hispanic voters barred from the polls might have made the difference if they had been allowed to vote -- and cost Bush the election? Without a doubt.

[Research done after Michael Moore's book was written finds that over 91,000 Florida voters were denied their right to vote by the Bush/Harris felon scheme. Of those voters, 90% are known to be Democrats. An excellent resource on US election fraud is the investigative reporter Greg Palast. Palast works for BBC Television and also writes for British newspapers. Palast is a "muckraker" of the most honorable variety, and his reporting is as solid as it gets. Palast's work on the dirty details of the 2000 and 2004 US elections is groundbreaking -- but it is virtually unheard of inside the US.]

On election night, after the polls closed, there was much confusion over what was happening with the counting of the votes in Florida. Finally a decision was made by the man in charge of the election night desk for the Fox News Channel. He decided that Fox should go on the air and declare that Bush had won Florida and thus the election. And that's what happened. Fox formally declared Bush the winner.

But down in Tallahassee, the counting of the votes had not yet been completed; in fact, the Associated Press insisted it was still too close to call, and refused to follow Fox's lead.

Not so the other networks. They ran like lemmings after Fox made the call, afraid that they would be seen as slow or out of the loop -- even though their own news reporters on the ground were insisting that it was too early to call the election. But who needs reporters when you're playing follow the leader -- the leader, in this case, being John Ellis, the man in charge of Fox's election coverage. Who is John Ellis?

He's a first cousin of George W. and Jeb Bush.

Once Ellis made the call and everyone followed suit, there was no going back -- and nothing was more psychologically devastating for Gore's chances of winning than the sudden perception that HE was being the spoiler by asking for recounts, withdrawing his concession of defeat, tying up the courts with lawyers and lawsuits. The truth is that during all of this, Gore actually was ahead -- he had the most votes -- but that was never how the news media played it.

The one moment from that election night that I will never forget came earlier in the evening, after the networks had first -- correctly -- projected the state of Florida for Gore. The cameras cut to a hotel room in Texas. There sat George W. with his father, the former President, and his mother, Barbara. The old man appeared cool as a cucumber, even though it looked like curtains for Sonny. A reporter asked young Bush what he thought about the outcome.

"I'm not...conceding anything in Florida," Junior piped up, semicoherently. "I know you've all the projections, but people are actually counting the votes....The networks called this thing awfully earlier and people are actually counting the votes have different perspective so..." It was an odd moment in that crazy night of election result coverage. The Bushes, with their relaxed smiles, looked like a family of cats that had just wolfed down a bunch of canaries -- as if they knew something we didn't.

They did. They knew Jeb and Katherine had done their job months earlier. They knew cousin John was holding down the fort at Fox election central. And if all else failed, there was always that team Poppy could count on: the United States Supreme Court.

As we all know, that's exactly what happened for the next thirty-six days. The forces of the Empire struck back, and they did so without mercy. While Gore was stupidly concentrating on getting recounts in a few counties, the Bush team was going after the holy grail -- the overseas absentee ballots. Many of these ballots would come from the military, which typically votes Republican, and would finally give Bush the lead that denying the vote to thousands of blacks and Jewish grandmothers hadn't.

Gore knew this, and tried to make sure the ballots underwent maximum scruitiny before they could be counted. Sure, this ran contrary to the "let every vote be counted" plea he'd made when calling for recounts. But he also had Florida law, which is pretty clear about this, on his side. It states that overseas absentee ballots can only be counted if they were cast and signed on or before election day, and mailed and postmarked from another country by election day.

But while Jim Baker was chanting his matra -- "It's not fair to change the rules and standards governing the counting or recounting of votes after it appears that one side has concluded that is the only way to get the votes it needs" -- he and his operatives were doing just that.

A July 2001 investigation by the New York Times showed that of the 2,490 overseas ballots that ended up being included in the certified election results, 680 were considered flawed and questionable. Bush got the overseas vote by a ratio of 4 to 5. By that percentage, 544 of the votes that went to Bush should have been thrown out. Got the math? Suddenly Bush's "winning margin" of 537 votes is down to a chilly negative 7.

So how did all these votes end up being counted for Bush? Within hours of the election, the Bush campaign had launched their attack. The first step was to make sure that as many ballots got in as possible. Republican operatives sent out frantic E-mails to navy ships asking them to dig up any ballots that might be hanging around. They even put in a call to Clinton Defense Secretary William S. Cohen (a Republican) to ask him to put pressure on the military outposts. He declined, but it didn't matter: thousands of votes poured in -- even some that were signed after election day.

Now all they had to do was to make sure that as many of these votes as possible went to W. And so the real thievery began.

According to the Times, Katherine Harris had planned to send out a memo to her canvassing boards clarifying the procedure for counting overseas ballots. Included in this memo was a reminder that state law required all ballots to have been "postmarked or signed and dated" by election day. When it was clear that George's lead was rapidly shrinking, she decided not to send the memo. Instead she sent out a note that said ballots "are not required to be postmarked on or prior to" election day. Hmmm.

What caused her to change her mind -- and the law? We may never know, since the computer records that showed what happened have been mysteriously erased -- a possible violation of Florida's Sunshine Laws. Now, long after the horse has left the barn, Harris has turned over her hard drives to the media for inspection -- but only after her own computer consultant "looked them over." This is a woman who is now planning to run for Congress. Can these people get any more shameless?

Armed with the blessing of the secretary of state, the Republicans launched an all-out campaign to make sure as broad a standard as possible was used in counting these absentee ballots. "Equal representation," Florida style, meant that the rules governing acceptance or denial of your absentee ballot depended on what county you were from. Perhaps that would explain why in counties where Gore won, only 2 out of 10 absentee ballots with unclear postmarks were counted; in Bush counties, predictably 6 out of 10 such ballots made it into the final tally.

When the Democrats complained that ballots didn't follow the rules shouldn't be counted, the Republicans launched a fierce public relations campaign to make it look as if the Democrats were trying to screw the men and women who were risking their lives for our country. A Republican city council member from Naples was typical in his hyperbole: "If they catch a bullet, or fragment of a terrorist bomb, that fragment does not have any postmark or registration of any kind." Republican Congressman Steve Buyer from Indiana even obtained (possibly illegally) the phone numbers and E-mail addresses of military personnel so that he could gather tales of ballot-denial woe to garner sympathy for "our fighting men and women." Even Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf weighed in with the reflection that "it's a very sad day in our country" when Democrats start harassing military voters.

All the pressure worked on the wimpy, spineless Democrats. They choked. While appearing on Meet the Press, vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman argued that the Democrats should stop creating a fuss and not be bothered that hundreds of military ballots were being counted, just because they weren't "postmarked."

Lieberman, like so many others among this new breed of Democrats, should have fought for principle instead of worrying about image. Why? Well, as the New York Times found out:

344 ballots had no evidence that they were cast on or before Election Day

183 ballots were postmarked in the United States

96 ballots lacked appropriate witness information

169 ballots came from unregistered voters, had envelopes that weren't signed properly, or came from people who hadn't requested a ballot

5 ballots came after the November 17 deadline

19 overseas voters voted on two ballots -- and had both counted

All of these ballots violated Florida law, yet they all were counted. Can I say this any louder? Bush didn't win! Gore did! It has nothing to do with chads, or even the blatant repression of Florida's African-American community and their right to vote. It was a simple matter of breaking the law, all documented, all the evidence sitting there in Tallahassee, clearly marked without question -- and all done purposefully to throw the election to Bush.

On the morning of Saturday, December 9, 2000, the Supreme Court got word that the recounts in Florida, in spite of everything the Bush camp had done to fix the elections, were going in favor of Al Gore. By 2 P.M., the unofficial tally showed that Gore was catching up to Bush -- "only 66 votes down, and gaining!" as one breathless newscaster put it. It was critical to Bush that the words "Al Gore is in the lead" never be heard on American television: With only minutes to spare, they did what they had to do. At 2:45 that afternoon, the Supreme Court stopped the recount.

On the Court sat Reagan appointee Sandra Day O'Connor and Nixon appointee Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Both in thewir seventies, they were hoping to retire under a Republican administration so that their replacements would share their conservative ideology. On election night, O'Connor was overheard lamenting at a party in Georgetown that she couldn't hold out another four -- or eight -- years. Junior Bush was their only hope for securing a contented retirement in their home state of Arizona.

Meanwhile, two other justices with extremist right-wing viewpoints found themselves with a conflict of interest. Justice Clarence Thomas's wife, Virginia Lamp Thomas, worked at the Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank in D.C.; now, she has just been hired by George W. Bush to help recruit people to serve in his impending administration. And Eugene Scalia, the son of Justice Antonin Scalia, was a lawyer with the firm of Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher -- the very law firm representing Bush before the Supreme Court!

But neither Thomas nor Scalia saw any conflict of interest, and they refused to remove themselves from the case. In fact, when the Court convened later, it was Scalia who issued the now-infamous explanation of why the ballot-counting had to be halted: "The counting of votes that are of questionable legality does, in my view, threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election." In other words, if we let all the votes be counted and they come out in Gore's favor, and Gore wins, well, that will impair Bush's ability to govern once we install him as "President."

True enough: if the ballots proved that Gore had won -- which they eventually would -- then I guess that would tend to dampen the country's feelings of legitimacy about a Bush presidency.

In their decision, the Court used the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment -- the same amendment they've loudly disclaimed when used by blacks over the years to hald discrimination based on race -- to justify the theft. Because of the variation in the recount methods, they argued, voters in each district weren't being treated equally, and therefore their rights were being violated. (Funny, but only the dissenters on the court mentioned that the antiquated voting equipment found disproportionately in poor and minority Florida neighborhoods had created an entirely different -- and far more disturbing -- inequality in the system.)

Eventually the press got around to conducting their own recounts of the votes, doing their best to spin the jumbled ball of public confusion into orbit. The headline in the Miami Herald read: "Review of ballots finds Bush's win would have endured manual recount." But if you read the entire story, buried deep inside was this paragraph: "Bush's lead would have vanished if the recount had been conducted under the severely restrictive standards that some Republicans advocated....The review found that the results would have been different if every canvassing board in every county had examined every undervote...[Under] the most inclusive standard [that is, a standard that sought to include the true will of ALL the people] Gore would have won by 393 votes....On ballots that [suggested] a fault with either the machine or the voter's ability to use it...Gore would have won by 299 votes."

I did not vote for Al Gore, but I think that any fair person would conclude that the will of the people in Florida clearly went his way. Whether it was the counting debacle or the exclusion of thousands of black citizens that corrupted the results, there is little doubt that Gore was the people's choice.

There was no worse example of the wholesale denial of the right of each voter to have his vote properly documented than in Palm Beach County. Much has been made of the "butterfly ballot," which made it easy to vote for the wrong person because the candidates' names and punch holes were crammed unevenly onto facing pages. The media went out of its way to point out that the ballot was designed by one of the county's election commissioners, a Democrat, and then approved by the majority-Democrat local board. What right did Gore have to complain if his own party was responsible for the faulty design of the ballot?

Had anyone bothered to check, they would have discovered that one of the two "Democrats" on the committee -- the ballot's designer, Theresa LePore -- had actually been a registered Republican. She switched her party affiliation to Democrat in 1996; then, just three months after Bush seized office, she resigned as a Democrat and switched her voter registration to Independent. No one in the press bothered to question what was really going on.

Thus, the Palm Beach Post estimates that more than 3,000 voters, mostly elderly and Jewish, who thought they were voting for Al Gore ended up punching the wrong hole -- for Pat Buchanan. Even Buchanan went on TV to declare that no way in hell did those Jewish voters vote for him.

* * *

On January 20, 2001, George W. Bush, positioned with his junta on the Capitol steps, stood in front of Chief Justice Rehnquist and took the oath that Presidents take at their inaugurations. A cold and steady rain fell over Washington throughout the day. Dark clouds obscured the sun, and the parade route, usually jammed with tens of thousands of citizens all the way to the White House, was eerily bare.

Except for the 20,000 protesters who jeered Bush every inch of the way. Holding signs denouncing Bush for stealing the election, the rain-soaked demonstrators were the conscience of the nation. Bush's limousine could not avoid them. Instead of cheering crowds of supporters, he was greeted by good people moved to remind this illegitimate ruler that he did not win the election -- and that the people would never forget.

At the tradition point where Presidents since Jimmy Carter have stopped their limos and emerged to walk the last four blocks (as a reminder that we are a nation ruled not by kings but by, uh, equals), Bush's triple-armored black car with its dark-tinted windows -- favored by mobsters everywhere -- came to an abrupt halt. The crowd grew louder -- "HAIL TO THE THIEF!" You could see the Secret Service and Bush's advisers huddling in the freezing rain, trying to figure out what to do. If Bush got out and walked, he would be booed, shouted down, and pelted with eggs the rest of the way. The limousine sat there for what must have been five minutes. The rain poured. Eggs and tomatoes hit the car. The protesters dared Bush to step out and face them.

Then, suddenly, the President's car bolted and tore down the street. The decision had been made -- hit the gas and get past this rabble as quickly as possible. The Secret Service agents running beside the limo were left behind, the car's tires splashing dirty rain from the street onto the men who were there to protect its passenger. It might have been the finest thing I have ever witnessed in Washington, D.C. -- a pretender to the American throne forced to turn tail and run from thousands of Americans armed only with the Truth and the ingredients of a decent omelet.

Once the American Lie put the pedal to the metal, it ran for cover to the bulletproof reviewing stand in front of the White House. Many of Bush's family and invited guests had already left to get dry. But George stood there and waved proudly at the marching bands, their instruments disabled by the rain, the long parade of floats wilted and crumbled by the time they arrived at the 1600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue. Every so often a lucky convertible passed by, carrying the few dampened celebrities Bush had convinced to honor him -- Kelsey Grammer, Drew Carey, Chuck Norris. By parade's end Bush stood alone in the stands, drenched, even his parents having deserted him for shelter. It was a pathetic sight -- the poor little rich boy who came in second showing up to claim his prize, with no one there to cheer him.

Sadder still were the 154 million of us who had not voted for him. In a nation of 200 million voters, I would say we constitute the majority.

We know from history that Richard Nixon blatantly rigged an election. This resulted in the Watergate scandal when his associates broke into the headquarters of the Democratic Party. Most people aren't aware of his other election illegalities. History documents that Nixon's reelection committee took illegal campaign donations (including huge donations from foreign sources), used the FBI and CIA against political enemies, manipulated press coverage, and sent thugs to break up and spread disinformation across the country to disrupt the campaigns of his opponents, among other things. These crimes are all proven and documented but are swept under the rug with the label of the "Watergate era." If you have any sense of fairness, Nixon and the Republicans' actions of that time were simply illegal, undemocratic, and un-American. Some would say they were simply treasonous.

But let's look at later elections. Many report that Ronald Reagan received stolen notebooks of Jimmy Carter's debate preparations from right-wing reporter George Will during the 1980 election campaign. These notebooks were an invaluable help for Reagan in his debate against Carter.

But even more important was that the Reagan election team worked out a deal with the Islamic fundamentalists to keep US hostages in Iran. If you recall, during the Iranian revolution the Iranian people kicked out the US-imposed dictator, the hated Shah of Iran. This put the Islamic fundamentalists into power in Iran, the infamous Ayatollah religious leaders. During the revolution a group of militant young revolutionary Iranians seized the US Embassy and took over 50 Americans hostage. This was a major embarrassment to Carter, making him look impotent in an election year -- and the Reagan campaign spared no efforts to remind Americans of our seeming impotence.

During October of 1980 the Carter administration was finalizing a deal with Iran to free the hostages in return for some anti-tank missles that Iran desperately needed for its war against Iraq. This created fear in the Reagan campaign of an "October Surprise" (background info, more) -- Carter freeing the hostages just before the election, an event which would have likely thrown the election to Carter.

Carter knew that the Reagan campaign -- which included George Bush, former head of the CIA -- was talking with the Iranians. In an interview with Playboy magazine years after the events, Carter said, "We had reports since late summer of 1980 about Reagan campaign officials dealing with Iranians concerning delaying release of the American hostages. I chose to ignore the reports. Later, as you know, former Iranian president Bani-Sadr gave several interviews stating that such an agreement was made involving Bud McFarlane, George Bush and perhaps Bill Casey. By this time, the elections were over and the results could not be changed. I have never tried to obtain any evidence about these allegations but have trusted that investigations and historical records would someday let the truth be known."

The bargain to keep Americans locked up so that Reagan could "win" the election was made in a Paris meeting between Iranians and the Reagan election team. Former CIA agents and intelligence services from other countires (France, Russia based on Soviet-era reports) confirm this meeting. George Bush denies he was there (though he cannot account for his time during that period). So we have both US, third-party, and Iranian sources -- including the former Iranian president -- saying that a deal was made to trade US weapons from Israel to Iran in return for the Iranians holding the hostages until Reagan had won the election and was in office. The Iranians did just that, keeping the hostages sitting on a plane and awaiting word that Reagan was sworn in as president before letting the plane take off. And we know that US weapons were shipped from Israel to Iran immediately after Reagan took office.

Thus we have another example of an immoral Republican campaign rigging an election. Does keeping Americans locked up by a hostile foreign power for longer than they need be and subverting the foreign policy of the existing Carter administration constitute outright treason? You'll have to answer that. But in this case we see the second time in less than a decade that the national Republican party has subverted the democratic will of the American people. To me, that's serious stuff.

Add to that the election campaign of 2000 and George and Jeb Bush conspiring to steal the election as noted above. Do we see a pattern here?

This isn't to say that all Republicans are undemocratic, nor that all Republicans are immoral and will stoop to thievery to "win" elections. But if history teaches us anything, it's crystal clear that some Republicans on the national level will stoop that low. And getting caught simply isn't a deterrent to them.

And the most sad thing about this horrendous track record is that as Michael Moore points out above, the US is now little better than a banana republic. We can deceive ourselves and tell ourselves all is well, but we are not ruled by an elected president, we are ruled by a plutocratic oligarchy -- and it's not the first time.

I might argue that a banana republic is better -- banana republics have brave reporters who aggressively seek out government corruption and ask tough and embarrassing questions, bold opposition politicians, human rights activists, labor leaders, and election monitors who risk their lives to advance the cause of democracy in their country. But here in the US we have a Democratic[sic] party so weak and timid it barely qualifies as an opposition party, complete corporate ownership of politics (bought and paid for), a weak labor movement, and a mass media that specializes in parroting whatever the government says and reporting on the latest celebrity news.

One thing is clear: the US is not a democratic republic. We may have some fair elections (ignoring issues of corporate sponsorship, campaign financing, and media bias) on the state and local levels, but on the national level it's clear. On the national level we instead barely qualify as a banana republic. The question that remains is whether the American people are sharp enough to see through the lies and propaganda, bold enough and brave enough to take back their country and to punish those that violate our nation's most cherished institutions.

This article is copyright © Randy Edwards 2003 and is licensed under the GFDL.