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The Gulliberal Problem
January 17, 2006
By Ernest Partridge, The
Crisis Papers
 We've
got trouble enough from our adversaries – but God save us from
our friends!
Surely one of the most amazing aspects of the election fraud issue
is how so many otherwise smart liberals and progressives fail to
see what is right in front of their faces; namely that the key Congressional
races in 2002 were stolen, that the 2004 Presidential election was
stolen, and that, if business as usual prevails, the elections of
2006 and 2008 will be stolen. The voting machines are built by major
Bush contributors, his "pioneers," and their employees
write the secret software and count the votes. When asked to provide
proof that the vote totals are accurate, they can supply no proof,
simply because that's the way the machines are built and the software
is written. "Trust us!" is the only "proof"
that they can offer.
And so, when, before the 2004 election, the CEO of Diebold, Walden
O'Dell, announced that he would do "all in his power"
to "deliver" the deciding Ohio electoral votes to Bush,
few in the mainstream media or the Democratic party seemed to notice,
or care, that he could "deliver Ohio" in total disregard
of what the voters in Ohio might want, or how they might vote.
Meet the "gulliberals" (pronounced GULlibruls): prominent
Democrats, liberals, and progressives who have ears to hear but
hear not, eyes to see but see not, and brains to understand but
will not. Included among the gulliberals are Al Franken, Paul Begala,
Arianna Huffington, David Corn, Bernie Sanders, some writers for
Salon.com and Mother Jones; admirable individuals all, who are laboring
valiantly to overthrow the GOP in the next (alleged) election. Yet
they are also unwitting allies with the Republican National Committee,
as they say, with the GOP, "the elections were honest, so get
over it!"
Add to the roster of the gulliberals, every Democrat in the Senate,
and with the honorable exception of Rush Holt, John Conyers, the
Congressional Black Caucus, and a very few others, virtually every
Democrat in the House. Also such allied organizations such as People
for the American Way and MoveOn. All these prattle on about how
we must all work together to take over the Congress "next time,"
as if they were preparing for and facing a fair contest.
So once again, Lucy props up the football, and says, "c'mon,
Charlie Brown, let's see if you can kick it this time."
What's wrong with these people?
Don't they know how to recognize simple evidence? Can't they follow
an uncomplicated argument to its compelling conclusion? Answer:
yes they know, and yes they can. They just refuse to do so. My best
guess is that they simply can't bring themselves to face up to the
enormity of the Bush/GOP crime against our democracy.
Germany, c. 1938: "Yes, I know things are tough for us Jews,
but surely things can't get much worse than this. After all, this
is our country too!" Some of those who believed that things
could get worse and who acted accordingly are now, along with their
descendants, our neighbors and compatriots. Those who "couldn't
believe," perished in the Holocaust.
How, then are we to get through to the gulliberals? With two simple
questions, asked over and over, and over again until they finally
face up to them:
1. Can you prove that the elections of 2000, 2002 and 2004 were
not stolen?
2. Can your refute the evidence that these elections were stolen?
Name-calling ( "paranoid," "conspiracy theorists")
does not count as evidence.
In point of fact: (1) there is no proof that the elections were,
or will be, honest; not even if they were, in fact, honest, simply
because that's the way the machines and software are designed. This
conclusion is supported by an October, 2005 report from none other
than the non-partisan Government
Accountability Office – a report virtually ignored by the
mainstream media. (2) The evidence of fraud is overwhelming. University
Statistics professors such as Drs. Steven
Freeman, Arlene
Ash, Ron
Baiman, and, many
more put the odds of a fair and accurate vote count in 2004
at millions to one, in effect, impossible. So too the thirty-plus
percentage public opinion swings in the 2005
Ohio election that sunk three ballot reform initiatives. What
part of the meaning of "impossible" do the gulliberals
not understand? Add to this the demonstrable ability of hackers
to alter e-vote totals without leaving the trace. One such demonstration
by Bev Harris was conducted with DNC Chair Howard Dean on CNBC.
Another took place last month in Florida, leading to the decertification
of touch-screen machines in two counties. There is much more evidence
that I have cited many times before, but quite frankly all this
repetition is getting tedious. So once again, read it yourself here,
here,
here,
and here.
All this leads to a compelling question: just how much weight
of evidence is required to budge the gulliberals from their obstinate
denial? Might it perhaps be comparable to the evidence required
to convince Pat Robertson of Darwinism, Jerry Falwell of the fallibility
of The Bible, or George Bush that God did not tell him to invade
Iraq – which is to say, no amount of evidence at all?
Let us hope not. After all, most of the prominent gulliberals
are educated and otherwise reasonable individuals. So we must put
on the pressure. Call into the Franken Show. Write Arianna, and
send comments to The Huffington Post. Write your Congressperson,
the DNC and your local media. Hit them with these questions. And
then come back and hit them again. But don't expect much help from
the media, at least not right away. We must direct most of our fire
at the gulliberals. They mean well, and they want to oust the Busheviks
as much as we do. So they are persuadable. Demand that they confront
the evidence and either refute it or sign up with the election reform
movement.
For if the Republicans and their allies in the privatized election
industry can, once again, "program" any election result
that they want and leave no trace of the crime, all talk of winning
in November is futile, and all money and effort devoted to that
result is wasted. The Republicans will win again, no matter what
the public might want.
If we managed to crawl out of this hole before November, 2006
and take back our Congress, this is how it might happen:
The mainstream media will continue to lose its credibility, as
more and more of our compatriots match the official propaganda against
their personal experiences and memories. Colin Powell at the UN
and the "Winnebagos of Death." "Mission accomplished!"
The WMDs (Rumsfeld: "We know where they are"). The "reconstituted
nukes" (Cheney: "there is no doubt"). The smoking
gun as a mushroom cloud. "Greeted with flowers and candies."
Judith Miller's dispatches from Ahmed Chalabi. Bob Woodward's indulgent
portraits of "our Commander in Chief."
For the vast majority of Americans, economic conditions are bound
to get worse, sooner rather than later. Fewer and fewer will be
able to afford health insurance, or be able to send their children
to college. The value of their homes, their only reserve, will collapse.
They will begin to feel the loss of their accustomed liberties as
they will no longer write, send e-mails, use the telephone, buy
books or use their public libraries with assurance of their privacy.
News of the Abramoff and other scandals will intensify, and we
haven't heard the last of Patrick Fitzgerald's Plamegate investigations.
The public will come to realize that there is simply no way to "win"
the Iraq war, as the casualty figures will continue to mount up.
Amidst all this, American citizens will remember what it was like
to live in a country that was free, prosperous, and at peace. There
is only so much that Fox News, MSNBC, right-wing talk radio, and
a compliant mainstream media can do to cover-up the disastrous consequences
of the Bush policies. At long last, it is not enough.
As a result of all this, it will become ever-more "fashionable"
for ordinary citizens to criticize and ridicule Bush, and his favorability
ratings will soon resume their inexorable downward plunge. More
and more, we will hear the question, "how in the world did
we elect and then re-elect this clown, along with those brigands
in the Congress?" An agreeable answer will then be close at
hand: "we didn't!" The election fraud issue might then
break out into the open and overcome the mainstream media's determination
to suppress and ignore it.
Today, we see harbingers of that breakthrough. The pressure of
public opinion is building up under the lid of the media blackout.
In the year following the 2000 election, the Gallup Poll found that
from 15 to 24 percent of the public believed that Bush had stolen
the election, and the CBS/ New York Times poll reported that barely
more than half believed that Bush was legitimately elected in
2000. Doubts about the legitimacy of the election process have not
gone away, and in fact were boosted by the 2004 election. Occasionally
late-night TV comedians make jokes about it, a dangerous trend for
the GOP, given that most Americans seem to get their "news"
from David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, et al. Now and then
a maverick pundit or commentator such as Keith Olbermann mentions
the issue in the MSM. In short, there is within the American public
an indelible residue of skepticism and distrust persisting from
the 2000 and the 2004 elections. The mainstream media and the GOP
can try to suppress it, but they can't eliminate it. Sadly and ironically
in this effort they are joined by the gulliberals.
Strange to say, those of us who are struggling to expose the great
election fraud may be joined by an improbable ally: a small but
significant fraction of the financial and corporate elites. For
it may finally be dawning on some of the poobahs on Wall Street,
and through them a few significant voices in the mainstream media,
that they are sinking the ship that they are riding on. And that
when the great ship goes down, those in the luxury cabins will be
as doomed as those in steerage.
Bush's "pioneers" are, in their own way, as blind to
the economic shipwreck ahead as the gulliberals are to election
fraud. But the evidence in both cases is compelling. The housing
bubble is about to burst, consumer credit is almost maxed-out and
a sharp drop in consumer spending is certain to follow, China is
abandoning the dollar, we are at peak oil and energy prices are
bound to skyrocket. And the 95% of humanity living outside our borders
has just about had it with our imperial fantasies and may, at any
time, decide to shut down our economy without
firing a shot. Europe, OPEC and the Pacific Rim can do it, and
they know that they can, even if the Busheviks do not.
All this is slowly dawning on a few fat-cat movers and shakers,
a very few of whom might appreciate that all their wealth is derived,
ultimately, from the education, skill and labor of the rest of us,
and from our shared infrastructure, institutions, and political
traditions, most notably, the rule of law - all of which are being
outsourced, dismantled, and "drowned" in Grover Norquist's
"bathtub." The recent impeachment editorial in Barrons
may be a harbinger of this realization among a few of the elites.
And so, where the law, the Constitution, simple justice and morality
have failed, enlightened self-interest by the powerful and wealthy
may yet come to our aid. If and when these powers-that-be finally
decide to pull the plug on Bush, Inc., they can bring it down, just
as they did to Nixon, Inc. They can do so simply by spreading the
word, far and wide, that since 2000 (and perhaps before) elections
have been irrelevant and that the regime no longer governs "with
the consent of the governed." These elites, unlike us, have
the media access and control to do just that.
While none of this is inevitable, all of it is possible. But only
if the people act. To accomplish all this we will need the help
of the gulliberals, which means that they must be persuaded to abandon
their fantasy of honest elections.
But will they wake up in time to rescue our common political-economic
enterprise? That's where we the public, and particularly those of
us who labor in the progressive blogosphere, come in. Our voices
of protest are weak, but they are grounded in evidence and hard
reality. Once again, the elements of the election fraud issue are
exceedingly simple: (1) the advocates of paperless e-voting cannot
prove that the citizen's vote is secure, and (2) those advocates
have no plausible rebuttal to the readily available evidence, noted
above, that recent national elections have been stolen. It's as
simple as that.
In a perversion of our democracy, private citizens and citizen
organizations have had to take up the burden of proving that their
franchise is corrupt. This is not how it should be in a healthy
democracy. It should not be the obligation of the citizen to secure
his or her vote; instead, that citizen should have a right to a
secure ballot – a right guaranteed by that citizen's government,
and enforced by the rule of law. Thanks to the Busheviks and the
GOP establishment, we do not have this right, and so we must seize
it back from the privatized "election industry."
To do this, we must write and publish relentlessly, organize,
talk to all and any who will listen, and perhaps a few that won't.
We must wake up our sleeping and credulous "allies" the
gulliberals, tell the Democrats that they will get no support from
us unless and until they address and deal with the ballot fraud
issue, and we must encourage, support, and publicize any defections
from Bushism in the media and among the affluent elites.
As I have noted many times before and will say once again, the
Busheviks and their allies have the wealth and the power, and they
control the message. Thus the cause of we dissidents is hopeless:
as hopeless as the causes of General George Washington, of Mohandas
Gandhi, of Nelson Mandela, of Andrei Sakharov, of Martin Luther
King. Somehow, mysteriously, unexpectedly, the forces of history
provided opportunities, and these great men had the wisdom to identify
and to take advantage of these opportunities. While I find no leaders
of such stature and wisdom in evidence today, crises have a way
of producing such leaders. Now is the time for them to step forward,
as those opportunities now come before us.
"The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice."
(Martin Luther King).
Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in
the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He publishes
the website, The
Online Gadfly and co-edits the progressive website, The
Crisis Papers. He is at work on a book, Conscience of a
Progressive, which can be seen in-progress here.
Send comments to: crisispapers@hotmail.com.
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