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               | What Next? Out of the Ashes, an Opportunity: Nov. 6, 2002 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- Well, it was pretty ugly, wasn't it? Democrats lost big yesterday. In my home state, Fritz Mondale, who had to wage a very short campaign knowing that tens of thousands of absentee votes for Wellstone were lost to him, went down in a narrow defeat. If Paul Wellstone had lived, those votes and more would have been his, and the Senate picture would not be so grim. But, almost as if some evil demon in the pay of the Bush Junta had wanted to punish Wellstone for doing the right thing and doing well politically for it, his plane went down barely a week before the election. Are you all sitting down? Good. You'll need to be seated when you read my next sentence: Yesterday may well have been the best thing to happen to the Democratic Party. No, I'm not kidding. As several experts have already noted, the Democrats, even though the voters favored most of the issues the Democrats did, lost because they were too busy aping Republicans, muddying their own messages, and refusing to criticize in detail the failed and disastrous policies of the Bush regime. Joe Conason's excellent Salon piece lays it out in detail. (http://www.salon.com/politics/conason/2002/11/06/bush/index.html) Especially noteworthy for us is this little fact: In 1992, the GOP was where the Dems are now. They'd completely lost hold of both houses of Congress a few years earlier, and they'd just lost the White House to Bill Clinton. But did the Pubbies stop fighting? No! They got ten times as angry. Gingrich wrote his Contract on America. They frightened the Democrats, simply by acting as if they had a mandate they never actually possessed. And in 1994, they won back the Congress they'd lost in the late 1980s. Unfortunately, the Democrats, cowed by the increasing and unceasing GOP viciousness, learned the wrong lesson, which was to kowtow even further -- and lose more ground. Only in the 1998 elections did they actually gain any ground -- and that was more because of the public's being sickened over the Republicans' insane obsession with Bill Clinton's private life than because of any active campaigning on the DNC's part. However, those Democrats that bucked the non-existent, GOP-placating "leadership" of their party, were precisely those who did the best in 1998. That proved to be true again in 2000, and in 2002. The Democrats need to be themselves, not imitation Republicans. And the best way to do that is to put a real Democrat in as Minority Leader. Nancy Pelosi, the current Minority Whip, would be a good start. The Democratic congressmembers that followed her lead and ignored Gephardt's self-interested cowardice -- persons such as Rush Holt of New Jersey, and Rick Larsen and Jay Inslee of Washington state -- were the ones that did the best in their House races, winning where more Bush-subservient Democrats lost. Gephardt was too interested in feathering his own nest to be an effective leader. He muffed several items, most importantly the whole issue of invading Iraq. If he'd only joined in with people like Dick Armey and Brent Scowcroft, both before and after the Bushistas forced them to recant their opposition to the Rumsfeld-Perle-Wolfowitz invasion scheme, he'd have stopped this horrifically stupid plan before it got started. But noooooo. He wanted to improve his chances of becoming President someday -- a dream he's had for decades -- and he thought that kowtowing to Bush was the way to do it. The ruinous effects of his self-serving cowardice have finally been made clear to every Democratic officeholder, and he's being forced to do the honorable thing. Paul Wellstone, Nancy Pelosi, and the other brave Democrats who didn't knuckle under to Bush, all showed that being a principled liberal pays off at the polls. Let's remember their lessons and leave the mealy-mouthed cowering behind. No Retreat, No Surrender Nov. 6, 2002 (APJP) -- OK. I admit I was depressed late Tuesday night when I saw the vote totals in the U.S. Senate races in Missouri, Minnesota, and Texas going against the good side, or the lesser of two evils. I admit when Republicanazis taunted me in their emails to me and their posts on the message boards of AOL, Yahoo, and others that I regularly haunt, I returned their fire with even greater insults and profanity that some would call immature. But dammit, sometimes those cuss words describe your mood so well it would be downright hypocritical NOT to use them. And I won't apologize for insulting Republicanazis, who spent the entire eight years of good times under President Clinton doing likewise to the better side. So when an AOL "volunteer message board leader" named Steph sent me an email last night informing me that "our community has certain standards of conduct for members to follow" and that my to-the-point post -- I finally got tired of long-winded comebacks and just posted a "F@&K YOU, REPUBLICANAZIS!!!!!" on the AOL message board [Steph's message to me even included the heading, "Subject: Re: America spoke and said..." then a copy of my "FU" retort, as if "America" issued such a message] -- was deemed "inappropriate" and removed to "avoid disruption to the message board discussion," and that "depending on the severity of the disruption, a report may have been submitted to AOL's Community Action Team for further review," -- man, those AOL nazis have me quaking in my boots now -- I had to respond with this: "You let the Republicanazis use whatever profanity they want -- I have seen them use whore and slut and bastards and bitches and more.....You AOL nazis are pathetically partisan!" And Steph replied back, "If you have questions or concerns about a post that was removed, you can contact screen name LDRS News Boards where a supervisor will respond to your question or comment." And I have done so, believe me, to whatever little avail. I kept busy on The Day After answering such email with in-your-face retorts. I found it to be good therapy in dealing with the nightmare of Tuesday night. The sun shined in Texas on Wednesday, but I didn't feel like going for a walk or bike ride with my young son [don't worry, he had mom and grandma to entertain him]. I wanted to answer each and every one of those smug, arrogant emails sent to me by Republicanazis to try to get my goat. I wanted to show them that Tuesday night and the previous years had not defeated me. I wanted to get to the bottom of what went wrong on Nov. 5, 2002, and figure out what we can do right -- or left. Some of the emails are more ominous than others. One "compassionate conservative" calls me an "ASSHOLE" and warns that "I'm going to f@&king find out your information and hunt you down like a dog, so your corpse rots in some sewer system with a .38 slug in your braincase." Another says in all caps: "NEXT EMAIL WILL COST YOU. YOUVE BEEN WARNED, HOMO LOVER." Another simply writes: "You are a nutcase." So I write back, "Why am I a nutcase? You know nothing about me....Who are the HELL are you???" The woman writes back, "Please omit profanity! Confirms that you are a nut case." I reply, "Hell is not profanity. It's in your bible. Here's something a Bush-ass-kissing conservative like you might enjoy [ass is also in your bible]." And I send her a previous Fight the Right column I wrote. Her son writes back, calling me a "moronic ostrich." He warns, "This has the potential of becoming very personal and you would not enjoy the experience." So it goes. Other Republicanazis criticize me for using the word "nazi" against them, saying it somehow demeans what the German nazis stood for, a response that bewilders me. One even adds, "As my brilliant Chinese engineering professor used to say about democrats when i was in college, 'yoh peepoh ah sooooooooooooo stoopit.' As i say today, 'yoh peepoh still fit the bill.'" I write back, "Oh yeah, you Republicanazis are ones to talk. You and Rush Limbaugh and other dittoheads have gone around calling feminists 'feminazis' for years." And I add to the one who included the demeaning poke at Asian-Americans: "Typical Republicanazi -- you try to insult me and end up further displaying your racism." No response. So it goes. There are times when I have spent hours at this exercise. I'm not sure why. Should I just ignore these Republicanazis and hope they go away? Has that ever worked in the last century? Now, they control the White House, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, the governor houses, the Supremely Unjust Court, the media, the CIA, the other "intelligence" agencies, the FBI, etc. Has ignoring Republicanazis stopped them from gaining such control? Has responding stopped them? Tough questions. At some point, I have to ask other questions. How does a Republicanazi win as governor in Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, and other Northeastern states I thought bled Democratic? How does a Republicanazi senator easily win in New Mexico and Oregon, Western states that went for Gore in 2000? For that matter, how does a Democratic senator easily win in Montana, which overwhelmingly was in the bad side's pouch in 2000? Are there some deeper, more sinister forces at work here, who want us to fight each other while they run off with the family jewels? Is the Illuminati more than a conspiratorial video game? Republicanazi dirty tricks and fraud sure continued unabated from 2000. In the final days of the campaign of Texas Gov. Rick Perry -- who Bush hand-picked as his successor -- Perry, whose advisors include Bush babysitter Karen Hughes, ran commercials trying to link Democratic candidate Tony Sanchez to murderous drug dealers from Mexico. The ads reinforced racial stereotypes and helped convince all the redneck racists in Texas to vote against Sanchez. Republicanazi ads against other Democrats wrongly portrayed them as liberals, a kiss-of-death label in Texas politics. The damage was done. The Republicanazis even threw in some weird glitches in voting machines in three of Texas' largest counties -- including instances in which votes for Democrats are recorded for Republicanazis -- that cause counting delays. [Some reported the same thing happening in other parts of the country, such as Florida.] In another large Texas county, Democrats filed a lawsuit accusing election workers of intimidating certain absentee voters. And Republicanazis claimed victory on TV even before all votes were counted. In Maryland, Florida, and perhaps other states, fliers were handed out in minority communities telling them the wrong day to vote. Some wrongly informed them that they would have to pay parking tickets and even their rent before they would be allowed to vote. How many uninformed potential Democrats stayed home, not wanting to risk being arrested or worse, as Republicanazis won in those states? In Minnesota, probably the most liberal Democratic senator died a few days before the election in a mysterious plane crash. The so-called independent governor -- who is really a Republicanazi -- said he would appoint a Democrat to the seat in the interim, then made a big fuss about some Democrats urging others to carry on Sen. Wellstone's work during the memorial service, calling it a partisan show. Did he make such a fuss when Republicanazis turned Nixon's funeral into a partisan, Amway-like rally? No, he decided to "punish" Democrats by naming a no-name "independent" to Sen. Wellstone's seat. And thousands of "independent" Minnesota voters sided with their "independent" governor -- whose office issued a ruling benefiting Republicanazis on absentee ballots a few days before that looked like it came from the White House -- and voted for the Republicanazi on election day. In Missouri, where two years earlier, the Democratic Senator-to-be died in another suspicious plane crash, voters elected the Republicanazi. Earlier, Missouri Republican Secretary of State Matt Blunt issued rules about voter eligibility that Democrats said were designed to keep certain Democrats from voting. The reports continue; they are too many to document here. In New Jersey and Arkansas, Republicanazis went before state supreme courts to try to thwart Democrat requests. In Illinois, a mother and daughter working as Republicanazi election judges in the March primary were indicted on vote fraud charges for allegedly spoiling 66 ballots. So it goes. What should our response to Nov. 5, 2002, be? More than 200 years ago, our forefathers and forefathers took up arms against a dictatorial regime. Despite all the evidence, I still think there are more non-violent, legal ways to fight back. In 1984-85, I marched more than 5,000 miles across this damn country and Europe to raise awareness about -- and protest against -- the Reagan administration's mad policies that took us to the brink of a nuclear war with the former Soviet Union. Reagan officials and other government officials had to meet with us, after all the national, international, and local media that stunt received. We also met thousands of voters who we made think about such policies. There are such marches going on now against the Bush regime's plans. In the Dallas area the day before the election, Bush and other Republicanazis rallied in a university arena. Several Texas Republicanazi speakers said they were happy to see a "Republican rain" that would keep people from voting, thinking a low turnout would help them and lending more evidence to the claim that Republicanazis don't want people to vote. As Bush addressed the crowd, some infiltrators unveiled a banner objecting to Bush's blood-for-oil, impending invasion of Iraq. Their message and their yells against Bush made the TV cameras and big-city daily newspapers. Greenpeace is an organization that stages quite creative protests against harmful environmental policies, such as dumping tons of coal on a D.C. street to protest Bush-Cheney's energy plan. They get noticed. Some are stunts, but they are mostly effective. Creativity is on our side. We can come up with off-beat, effective ways to legally protest the Bush administration that will get noticed. We can try to convince a moderate Republican senator to defect as Sen. Jeffords did last year. We can ask a state -- perhaps independent Vermont -- to secede from the United States to form its own progressive country as a deeper protest, and then move there to help develop a truly democratic country. The key is to keep the other side guessing, to keep them on their toes.. The key is to not get down. The key is to take some action. With a young family, I cannot always break free to infiltrate a Republicanazi team meeting to stage a protest. But I try creative ways to register my protests through my computer. I write columns and letters, I post, I chat, I keep coming back through different names when right-wing sites evict me. A few weeks before the election, I got my sarcastic "Top ten reasons to vote Republican this November" posted to the Free Republicanazi web site. It was on there for more than an hour before being taken down, my personal record on that site. The Freepers even helped me distribute that column, as they sent it out to others in their "can-you-believe-this-guy?" rage. Someone sent me a response by someone who said, "The minute you quoted Jackson Thoreau the post was moot. It would be similar to me quoting Limbaugh or Hannity. A wall immediately goes up on both sides, my side as well as yours. Why? Because all 3 are biased." Though I am certainly not in Limbaugh's or Hannity's leagues -- thank God -- I consider it a badge of honor to even be referred to in this way. I have only been writing these Internet columns and such for a couple of years, since Bush & Co. stole the White House. You think one person can't make a difference? Think again. My response to what occurred on Nov. 5, 2002, is the same one I had when I was walking 5,000 miles and came upon obstacle after bloody obstacle. I will find a way to keep walking, to keep working against the Republicanazi regime. I am still as angry about the stolen 2000 election as I was the day I seethed through Al Gore's concession speech. I still think Gore should not have conceded and should have fought the Supreme Court ruling, rather than give up and make a concession speech. Sure, the Republicanazis would have found some other way to subvert our vote-counting process. But they would KNOW they were in a fight. And the Democratic Party would emerge with more respect, as a party that did not concede when it knew it was right. We all have to find our own way to deal with this present, gloomy situation staring at us. My path is not the only one. Find your own. Follow it. Keep fighting the good fight against the Republicanazis, strongly but without physical violence -- you'll do little good in one of Ashcroft's concentration camps. No retreat. No surrender. Jackson Thoreau is co-author of We Will Not Get Over It: Restoring a Legitimate White House. The 110,000-word electronic book can be downloaded on his Fight the Right Internet site at http://www.geocities.com/jacksonthor/ebook.html or on Citizens for Legitimate Government's site at http://www.legitgov.org/we_will_not_get_over_it.html. Thoreau can be emailed at jacksonthor@justice.com. Inside Karl Rove's Election-Night Diary Nov. 6, 2002 (APJP) -- Now, THAT was fun! The liberals never knew what hit 'em. Clueless, those guys. But, based on our polling and focus groups, yours truly knew weeks ago. That's why I could safely send George out on the hustings for that last-minute pick-me-up to the GOP troops. (The Prez wasn't happy about having to work, and disrupting his nap patterns, but he sure appreciates my plan now.) The boy genius rides again. Sure feels good. I needed to redeem myself big time after blowing the Jim Jeffords thing, which threw our whole agenda into disarray. But now it's clear sailing. Thank you, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. We rode those bogeymen into the sunset. I was worried that maybe we were too obvious and the electorate might see through what we were doing. But no worry; by playing up the possibility of new terror attacks and the evil Saddam, the fear factor worked, and the American citizenry marched in lockstep, giving us whatever we wanted. Our friends in the media kept all that sinking-economy news off the front pages, and all our scandals as well (I loved the way I orchestrated Harvey Pitt's resignation, dropped right into the election coverage and nobody even noticed), and then, thank you Lord!, the D.C. sniper came along and dominated the news cycles for several weeks just before the vote. And he was even named "Muhammad"! Couldn't have asked for a better script. And the best part was that the Dems didn't know what to do. They were so unbelievably dispirited and disorganized. They wanted to slam us on the Iraq issue but couldn't or they'd risk revealing themselves for the unpatriotic wimps they are, so a lot felt obliged to vote with us. When key Dem leaders like Daschle and Gephardt and Feinstein and Kerry voted with us, I knew the election was in the bag. Those stupid liberals had no unified program to offer in opposition to ours -- and, what's more important, no balls. The September 11 events are still working their magic for us, just as we thought they would. (And now, given the election results, we can be assured that there will be no independent investigation of our behavior or the cover-up. We're home free!) Well, sure, we've still got to work with the Dems in the Senate, who could, if they decide they're going to put up a fight, cause trouble for our legislation. But, I think we can roll enough of them to get the required 60 votes when we have to. We'll get our judges approved, we'll get the tax cut made permanent for our friends, we'll change the composition of the Supreme Court (goodbye, Roe v. Wade!), ANWAR here we come with our drilling rigs, and on to Baghdad. (If we really want to go there; we don't need to now. We could get the U.N. inspectors in there and finesse our way out of having to invade.) The added bonus of our electoral sweep is that we're in good shape for the 2004 race. Jeb's in place, and Liddy might be a dynamite partner for George. A Bush-Dole ticket! Now, that's brilliant! We'll carve the women's vote away from the Dems. They can keep the Jews and the blacks and Arabs. The Dems ain't goin' anywhere for a long time. We're in like Flynn for at least six more years, with Jeb to follow. We've got the Congress, we've got the White House, we've got the Supreme Court, we've got the media in our pockets. And all the Dems have to oppose us is a few predictable malcontents, an insignificant peace movement (which we can always ruin with some of our undercover guys engineering some violence), and some wackos writing on the internet. Given our election sweep, Ashcroft can take care of all those traitors, without having to look over his shoulder all the time. John is so happy; he was smarting about having lost to a dead man in the last election, but the Carnahan widow is no more. Of course, it's possible that we've stirred up a hornet's nest and the Dems will be galvanized to reorganize themselves into a true opposition. (Gephardt probably will resign as House Minority Leader -- I don't blame him: Nobody wants to have to do daily battle against that obnoxious, but effective, buzz saw Tom DeLay). But I doubt it. They're too frightened and scattered, and they just don't have the troops behind them in the electorate to give them courage. Nor do they have a real leader; Daschle and Gephardt abdicated when they voted for the Iraq war. Wellstone could have been the rally-around guy, but, sorry for him great for us, he's gone. No need to worry. We're in the driver's seat for the next six years, and probably beyond, and our political enemies are just going to have to get used to it. If not, we'll destroy them totally. This is going to be so much fun! ---------- Bernard Weiner, Ph.D., is co-editor of the new online political site CrisisPapers.org , has taught American politics and international relations at San Diego State and Western Washington Universities, and was with the San Francisco Chronicle for nearly 20 years. Guest Editorial Many of us out here on the "fringe left" predicted the results of the midterm elections. Despite the pundits' and political strategists' (both Democrat and Republican) best guesses, the GOP swept into power on Tuesday night like a juggernaut, basically winning all of the close races. More intriguingly, a look at the map shows that wherever George W. Bush went on his last-second campaign stops, the Republicans triumphed. The leader of the once free world now can "claim" the results of this midterm election as a "mandate" for his extremist agenda. With control of Congress, the Presidency, and the Media -- and aided by his Black Ops secret police -- there is no stopping his right wing agenda now. The best the Democrats can do now is stall Bush's draconian domestic designs on the American populace, but that's it. Why was it such a landslide, you may ask? A few facts stick out. First, the GOP-friendly "mainstream" media bent over backwards in the days leading up to the elections by covering Dubya's campaign tour as if he were a conquering Caesar. The media also did their best to keep Democratic issues such as social security, prescription drug coverage and the sorry state of the economy on the back burner in favor of issues that helped the Republicans: Terror, War and Fear. They suppressed reports on the surging anti-war fever in the U.S. and instead continued to hype the phantom fears of international terrorism and rogue evildoers. That helped the GOP a lot. Second, negative campaigning triumphed. The nation may have never before seen more vicious midterm campaigning. Republican strategists played every nasty trick in the book -- from ridiculing Democrats with bobble heads to accusing Democratic war heroes of anti-Americanism. And it worked all too well. Despite their best efforts, Democrats just aren't as mean, nasty, vindictive, relentless, ruthless or soulless when it comes to fighting dirty -- that much has now been proven. Third, and most explosive, the results lack ANY credibility. Too much massive voter fraud has been exposed to take them seriously. As I said before, it's more than passing strange that wherever the selected Corporate President went, Republican victory was sure to follow. It also is extremely coincidental that progressive ballot initiatives such as marijuana legalization in Nevada and universal health care in Oregon were defeated. Resoundingly. It's also highly suspicious that the last-minute abandonment by the Voter News Service of exit polls would help smooth over any overly egregious voting hanky panky. Technical "glitches" are always an easy excuse for planned disenfranchisement. As Greg Palast (http://www.gregpalast.com/) has reported, and as Michael Rivero (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/stolenelection.html) has documented, massive voter fraud was being planned for months. The fix was in. This is probably why Dubya felt so confident that his whirlwind campaigning wouldn't hurt him. Traditionally, sitting Presidents don't dare intrude on close races. It can backfire, as Woodrow Wilson discovered in 1918, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1938. In both those cases, the close races were lost when the voters decided to punish those Presidents for sticking their noses in to Congressional politics. This might also be why the White House sent a congratulatory message to Jeb Bush for his gubernatorial victory in Florida, before the official results were even in. A wink and a nod to those of us in the know. (Who you gonna call? Votebusters?) Lastly, the movers and shakers of the Democratic Party itself must shoulder a major portion of the blame. Their failure to stand up to Bush and put forth a clear alternative to his neo-conservative vision when they had the chance spelled their doom. The traditional base was ignored, as was their youth movement. Over and over, the DNC attempted to marginalize their own base by distancing themselves from calls to get tough with the Bush Administration. They gave in to Bush and Cheney's demands for a limited investigation into the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. They failed to hold Attorney General John Ashcroft's Justice Department to account for the unprecedented attack on civil liberties and spectacular inability to track down the anthrax killers. They accommodated the Bush Administration's war mongering when half of them voted to approve Bush's hard line stance on Iraq -- this despite the fact that most Democratic supporters were fervently against it. The senior Democratic strategists seemed unaware that they desperately needed to embrace the so-called "radical left" instead of smearing them with tactics that would make even Propaganda Minister Karl Rove proud. As far as I'm concerned, the US has now been officially US-urped by a neo-fascist administration bent on global domination and the installation of a domestic police state. Their ability to stack the judiciary with extremist supporters is perhaps the scariest scenario envisioned. Imagine: the far right now has at their disposal the tools to remake the social fabric of America in their vision, one which mixes corporate rapine and theological supremacy with a global militaristic agenda. You can take the following statement to the bank: any serious, independent, open and accountable investigations into 9-11, corporate crime, the sniper shootings, the anthrax murders or anything else that might cast aspersions on the honesty or decency of this corrupt administration is dead in the water. I guarantee it. The Free Market Jesus is exultant. He sits atop a nuclear bomb, Holy Bible in one hand and a suitcase full of investor's stolen cash in another, hooting and hollering all the way towards Armageddon. There. Don't you feel safe now? QUOTE OF THE DAY From Bartcop (http://www.bartcop.com) What I heard America say last night: * We want the rich to have more money. Of course, none of that is true, but the Democrats refused to fight, just like Gore in 2000. If they continue to wear the pink tutu, we'll lose 2004, and then Jeb will win in 2008. | ||||
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