The Assassination of President Gore
I wrote the following on Sunday, Dec. 10, 2000, the day after the U.S. Supreme Court effectively halted the hand recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court on Dec. 8, thus deciding the election in favor of Bush. The formalities were not over, but the writing was on the wall. Although this was not the first time a president was elected who lost the popular vote (Gore won by 543,895 votes; cf. Hayes vs. Tilden 1876 and Harrison vs. Cleveland 1888), it was the first time the outcome had been decided by the intervention of the Supreme Court. Here is a summary of what many now refer to as "Selection 2000":
The 2000 election will go down in history, not only for the gridlock in Florida, but also for the way in which it split the Supreme Court, which had never before stepped in to rule on a federal election. The court divided 5–4 on partisan lines in its decision to reverse the Florida Supreme Court, which had ordered manual recounts in certain counties, saying the recount was not treating all ballots equally, and was thus a violation of the Constitution's equal protection and due process guarantees. The Supreme Court essentially ruled that the Supreme Court of Florida would need to set up new voting standards and carry them out in a recount, but also mandated that this process and the recount take place by midnight, Dec. 12, 2000, the official deadline for certifying electoral college votes. Since the Court made its ruling just hours before the deadline, it in effect ensured that it was too late for a recount. In the end, tens of thousands of undervotes—votes that were never tallied by voting machines for a number of reasons—remained uncounted, casting doubt on who actually won the election. As the Dec. 16th edition of The Economist put it, “by remanding the decision to the Florida court with instructions to do something it knew to be impossible, the court ended the election but laid itself open to charges of intellectual dishonesty.” In a scathing dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said, “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law” (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0877961.html).
What we are witnessing now is an assassination without the blood. As in 1963, we are seeing the blatant usurpation of the presidency by the fascist powers that have controlled the country–behind an ever growing, omnipresent media smokescreen–ever since the execution of President Kennedy in Dealey Plaza.
This time the murder weapons are not rifles but voter fraud and judicial corruption at the highest level, as demonstrated by the US Supreme Court's announcement yesterday that it, in the person of five judges, will decide (tomorrow) who becomes president, and not the people who voted in Florida on Nov. 7. There is no longer any doubt what the outcome will be.
Gore has long since won the popular vote nationwide by more than 300,000 votes, and it has become clear that he would also win in Florida if the manual recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court were allowed to continue. What the Republicans have failed to do by massive voter fraud in the state controlled by George W. Bush's little brother Jeb, and have threatened to do by legislative decree at the state level, they have now accomplished by judicial decree at the highest level.
The US Supreme Court is playing essentially the same role now as it did in 1964, when Chief Justice Earl Warren produced a fairy tale known as the Warren Report that the majority of the American people have always known is a pack of lies. It is now sanctioning, as the highest authority, the virtual appointment of the president, against the express will of the people.
This may be a bloodless coup (so far, anyway), but it is no less significant, and even more transparent (if that is possible), than the events in Dealey Plaza that put the war president, LBJ, in office in 1963. Whatever the wording of the Court's opinion, it will decide for Bush and he will become president. The message to the people is clear, perhaps even clearer than it was in 1963: "We've got you by the balls. The fundamental principle of the state is not democracy; if it were, the votes in Florida would be counted. L'état, c'est moi." This is not a fairy tale à la Lee Harvey Oswald, but a clear statement of principle. We know where they stand, and thus we know where we stand.
The power axis is clearer, too. We need not speculate about the "conservative" forces in 1963 who feared a "Kennedy dynasty," and made doubly sure of preventing it by murdering brother Robert in 1968, and who now have achieved precisely that imperial wish with their own anointed family, the Bushes. (The first–erroneous–announcement of Bush as the winner on election night came from the Fox News Channel desk of John Ellis, a first cousin of George and Jeb.) The Bushes' alliance with the CIA, George Sr. having been the first former CIA director (if anybody can be "former" CIA) to occupy the White House, is in perfect contrast to the Kennedys' distrust and hatred of them (John having vowed at one time to "smash them into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind").
We've come a long way, baby. And where are we? The blood will come, as it did in Vietnam. I don't think George W. is being foisted upon us in this overtly fascistic manner for nothing. We will pay the price for our complacency if we let it stand, which I am afraid we will. Led by the fully complacent–and thus complicit–television (and other) media, we will listen to the interminable bla-bla from the talking heads until we can't stand it anymore and shut the damn thing off. The fundamental principle of democracy, the right to vote and have our votes counted, will have been blatantly violated by the highest authority in the land, which means the last vestiges of democracy are gone, and we will have accepted it. We should not be surprised when the Brown Shirts and the Gestapo re-appear.
Now, seven years later, the polls show that the majority of the population would now agree that this election theft was an adumbration of worse things to come. My prediction, of both the blood and the advancing police state, has unfortunately come true. Since this book, and my search for the enemy, began with the assassination of President Kennedy, it is appropriate to end it here, with the assassination by the Bush regime of our constitutional right to live in peace and freedom.
It is much clearer now than it was in 1993, or even in 2000, who the enemy is. It is still ourselves, in the end, since it is up to us to fight back, but the noose has tightened, and the faces of the hangmen and hangwomen are plain to see. One need only look at the records of our so-called representatives in Congress to see who voted for the Patriot Acts, the war appropriations, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, etc. They are by no means all Republicans. The great majority of Democrats, too, have failed, utterly and consistently, even after winning the 2006 election, to oppose the Bush-Cheney doctrines of militarism abroad and elitism and neo-fascism at home. The forces of evil are non-partisan. .