‘By whatever means necessary’

In the aftermath of Election 2000, angry partisan Democrats vowed to do everything in their power to make the Bush presidency a failure and to defeat him in 2004 “by whatever means necessary.”

In the process, they’ve managed to undermine voter confidence in our election system to the degree that the State Department has asked the Europeans to monitor this election for fairness. They’ve managed to convince voters that the election isn’t fair because the voting machines are suddenly too complicated for old people and minorities.

There have been endless stories about Florida this year and how to avoid a “repeat of Election 2000” by improving the voting system.

While nothing is idiot-proof, old people and minorities managed to elect Bill Clinton twice using the same equipment. It didn’t need to be overhauled until it somehow misfired and elected George Bush instead. No matter how many times they recounted, George Bush still got more votes than Al Gore. Therefore, there must be something wrong with the voting equipment.

Nothing appears to be above exploitation. John Kerry even dedicated a speech he delivered on Monday to the late actor Christopher Reeve. Kerry said he knew the “Superman” actor for about 15 years through family and dedication to the same causes, and said Reeve left him a long voice-mail on Saturday thanking him for campaigning on the possibilities of a cure for conditions like his.

It had been originally reported that Reeve died on Sunday after slipping into a coma on Thursday following complications from treatment for a bed sore. After John Kerry’s speech, reports of Reeve’s death were changed to remove the reference to Thursday in order to make it possible for Reeve to call John Kerry and leave a long message for him on his answering machine on Saturday night. Evidently, Kerry didn’t know about the “coma” part until after the speech, but his well-oiled damage-control team was already on it.

A blogger on Free Republic provided one example of the “before and after” media manipulation that kept John Kerry from having another “Christmas in Cambodia” moment like the ones that keep coming up every time he tries to exploit the dead.

And if exploitation, media manipulation and outright lies don’t work, how about voter intimidation? GOP Chairman Marc Racicot issued, as part of a GOP press release, a copy of a letter he sent to the president of the AFL-CIO. As of yesterday morning, the only place you can read it is a website in Spain.

In it, Racicot asked organized labor to end its campaign of violence against Bush-Cheney political offices and Bush supporters. Among the incidents cited by Racicot:

• A coordinated labor protest at more than a dozen campaign and party headquarters across the country.

• In one protest in Orlando, the office was vandalized and one campaign worker had their arm broken in the melee.

• In Canton, Ohio, a Bush-Cheney ’04 staffer was forced to lock herself in an office while another break-in was in progress.

• Gunshots were fired into Bush-Cheney ’04 offices in West Virginia, Florida and Tennessee, windows broken in West Virginia and campaign staffers threatened.

• In Wisconsin, a supporter of the president had a swastika burned into his front yard simply because he had a Bush-Cheney ’04 lawn sign.

Disinformation, voter fraud, organized violence, outright lies, exploitation and media manipulation. Those were the principle tools used by the Nazis to bring Hitler to power in 1933 Germany.

But this isn’t 1933, and this isn’t Germany. That stuff doesn’t work here. This is AMERICA!

Or, it used to be.