Tennn-HUT! The GOP Giveth and Taketh Away
and The Oxygen of Democracy: The Importance of a Truly Free Press
by Tamara Baker
Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2000 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (AmpolNS) -- Hey, you!
That's right, you! You in the uniform over there, listening to The Rush Limbaugh Show over Armed Forces Radio!
Put the safety on your gun and listen to this:
Know how Rush and Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf ( you know, he of the fancy-schmancy wine parties he hosted while you-all were choking down MRTEs in Desert Storm) were trying to get you guys and gals all to march on Washington and hang Al Gore from a bayonet because he was keeping you from voting?
Guess what: now that the Democrats who count in this matter, including Florida's Attorney General Bob Butterworth, have said that unpostmarked military ballots should be included in the recounts, it turns out that that the Republicans have now waffled on you!
They now say that your votes shouldn't count after all!
Here's the scoop, straight from the Associated Press
(http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20001121/el/recount_overseas_24.html):
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) - Republicans decried an effort by Florida's Democratic attorney general to reconsider rejected presidential ballots from servicemen abroad as a belated effort to rectify an embarrassing Democratic move in the state's pivotal election recount.
Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a supporter of the Democrats' candidate, Vice President Al Gore (news - web sites), sent a letter Monday to county election officials across Florida urging them to count the spurned ballots.
Clay Roberts, Republican-appointed director of the State Division of Elections, said the overseas vote was counted and certified by all 67 county elections supervisors and the state has no plans to reopen the issue.
"The state canvassing commission is forbidden by law to look beyond those returns,'' Roberts said.
Now, riddle me this: why are the Republicans suddenly AGAINST having your votes count, folks in uniform? Are they sincerely on your side...or just using you as political cannon fodder?
Here's a hint:
Clay Roberts must have realized that allowing your recounted votes to be certified would mean that
a) ALL the recounted results, including the Democratic ones, would have to be certified as well by Cruella DeHarris, and that
b) allowing the improperly-processed and completed military ballots to be counted and certified then would justify allowing all the ballots with indented-but-not-punched-out perforations (the famous 'pregnant chads'), which would suddenly put Gore in the lead by close to 100,000 votes.
There you have it, servicemembers. The GOP giveth to you over the weekend, but then they taketh away on Tuesday. All those weekend photo-ops by General Schwarzkopf and Governor Mark Racicot (R-Montana Militia) were just so much horse hockey flung your way.
They really don't care about you at all.
And now, a word for all our readers:
If you haven't already done so, I strongly suggest that you hie your caboose over to TomPaine.com and read Mollie Dickenson's excellent article 'Burning the Village in Order to Save It'
(http://www.tompaine.com/opinion/2000/11/20/index.html).
In this gutsy, incisive article, Mollie Dickenson mentions what even the allegedly 'progressive' outfits like Salon (whose recent financial woes have apparently rendered it unable to pay for decent political writers: Joe Conason and Mollie herself are about the only good ones that appear in Salon anymore) do not mention:
BUSH HIMSELF BENEFITED FROM GOP-ORDERED RECOUNTS IN SIX FLORIDA COUNTIES!
One has to ask: WHY, oh WHY, is the alleged 'news' media so eager to conceal this fact? Is it laziness? Incompetence? Inexperience?
Or is it that the reporters on the ground know that that's not the story their bosses want told?
For democracy to work, a truly free press is ESSENTIAL. Facts and truth are the seedbed and the oxygen of democracy. The pioneering work of Colonial publisher John Peter Zenger in the 1730s made possible the American Revolution of the 1770s. It would not and could not have happened otherwise.
Nowadays, the media sources we have trusted for decades have become whited sepulchres, splendidly polished corporate-owned edifices concealing a corruption that eats away at our freedom. The New York Times allowed Jeff Gerth to run amok with not one, not two, but THREE badly-sourced and ultimately disastrously wrong 'scandal stories' -- Whitewater, Chinagate and Wen Ho Lee -- and rewarded Gerth with tainted Pulitzer after tainted Pulitzer, to the point where the award would be insulting to a real journalist.
Then there's broadcast media. Suffice to say that, ever since Newt Gingrich was bought off by Rupert Murdoch with a $4.5 million book deal, foreign corporate fascists have swooped into both the broadcast and print media worlds, buying up once-independent and intelligent papers and turning them into purveyors of garbage.
Bottom line: Our media is dying, and is taking our democracy with it. Unless we can get a strong, independent voice that's not afraid to commit real journalism, the lights will be going out on American democracy forever.