Lingering doubtfuls

(continued)

by Barry Crimmins

Until Sunday, few were discussing voting fraud, but a document urging improper use of absentee voting signed by Jeb Bush and distributed by Republicans was quoted in a report by Robert W. Neill Jr. of WebSiteDaily. And according to a Monday story by the Times of London "Democrat officials were examining claims that up to 17,000 ballot papers in the Miami area had been tampered with in what they described as `organised corruption.' "

So the battle that previously raged over recounts and re-votes has now expanded to fraud. But there was good news for the R's on Monday: Unpresident Bush's stress boil had begun to recede. Either that or there was an alien or anti-Christ loose in Texas. If he's smart, he won't head to Florida.

The Dems want manual recounts in four key counties there, and they are underway because, among other things, the electronic recount didn't jibe with the original count. So clearly electronic counts aren't infallible.

Concerning re-voting developments: 19,000 votes were disqualified because some people get confused when they arrive at the polls expecting to find a ballot but instead discover assembly instructions for a backyard grill.

Should those people, and everyone else in heavily pro-Gore Palm Beach County, be allowed another crack at voting? The Republicans say no and have a good argument -- a re-vote is unprecedented; it would allow one county to go to the polls, with full knowledge of how the rest of the country voted, and select the next president.

The Republicans should have shut up there, but of course they haven't.

They go on to say that if voters aren't smart enough to successfully complete a ballot, that's their tough luck.

People who think beady-eyed Junior Bush, a man who is no Dan Quayle, should be President of the United States have a lot of nerve calling people stupid because they were confused by a confusing ballot.

At issue is the butterfly/punch-card ballot which demands voter aptitude in (un)encryption, oragami, telepathy, and cribbage. I know because I struggle with just such a ballot in Ohio. And like at least 20,000 disenfranchised voters in Palm Beach County Florida, I find it confusing. This isn't because I'm too dumb to vote. It's because punch-card/butterfly voting is not user friendly.

This unfriendliness resulted in the scandal that began when the networks made an accurate call of a Gore Florida victory early Tuesday night. Horse-race network election calls seconds after polls close are a nuisance, but what has been lost here is that, in this case, they called it right. It's the state of Florida that was wrong by permitting punch-card voting.

Arguments that the 19,000 voided ballots in Palm Beach County shouldn't matter because 15,000 were voided in the last election have less credibility than the notion that W. was suddenly intelligent because he got through a few debates without the assistance of a drool cup. The point is, when 15,000 people got screwed out of their votes the last time around it became doubly incumbent that the travesty be repaired.

On Sunday night I watched the OJ mini-series on CBS, and found it, contrasted with this week's political events, to be a nostalgic stroll through a more innocent age. It was Dem flak James Carville's appearance on Meet the Press that helped turn the Simpson saga into escapist fare for me. Carville reminded me that I care about Florida only out of antipathy for Republicans and not allegiance to Democrats. In a scathing indictment of Ralph Nader, Carville suggested that no Democrat should ever again speak with the Green's standard bearer.

This from a man who is married to and has children with Republican strategist and noted reactionary talking head, Mary Matalin. To James, it's fine to mate and raise children with vicious right-wing blowhards, but there is no way anyone should ever forgive Ralph Nader for introducing dozens of legitimate issues to a corrupt campaign.

Ever since the election, Nader has been labeled a spoiler. And Carville really piled on Sunday morning. Well get this, Jimmy: you can't spoil what's already rancid.

Al Gore obviously agrees with Carville. He refused to speak with Ralph in the debates, in part because he didn't want to provide Nader with the opportunity to seem lifelike and charismatic. But mostly he didn't want Ralph in the debates because that would have allowed the Green candidate to illustrate the dreadful political similarities between Bush and Gore. Throughout the campaign, rather than challenge George W. Bush each time he besmirched his character, Gore . The Gore campaign made almost no political hay of the well-documented sleaze that permeates Bush's private and public lives. Not since Michael Dukakis chose to ignore the Iran-Contra Affair, in 1988, has a more important issue been neglected. Even George W. has acknowledged "youthful indiscretions "that by his own admission lasted until he was 40. Anyone who reads Molly Ivins knows about W's fleecing of family friends for huge amounts of money in bad oil deal after bad oil deal. Ivins readers also know about his looting Texas taxpayers to build the Texas Rangers a new baseball stadium and increase the value of the team so much that Bush bought into the franchise for $600 thousand and left a few years later with about $15 million. Talk about ballpark figures. Had Gore helped raise American awareness of Bush's boundless sleaze, W's blather about ethics would have provoked laughs and not votes. And when out of nowhere the Jews for Hitler surge reversed Florida and the election, people would have instantly smelled the rat that has hissed in their faces while pissing on them.

But instead of running against Bush, instead of challenging the Republicans, Al Gore and his people chose to smear Ralph Nader. Rumors that Nader was gay and a Red circulated. Come to think of it, maybe Nixon was a good role model for Al. The Gore camp threatened Green voters with the Judiciary and what would happen to it under Bush. And they took away a lot of Ralph's votes in the process.

But how many of Nader's 97,000 Florida votes could have been Gore's if just once he went after Bush with an honest assessment of the GOP candidate's faults rather than smear Ralph with phony charges? And how many more would he have gained if he sided with Nader and the people on any number of crucial issues?

At the moment, I favor Gore because I don't think the thieving Republicans should be allowed to steal the election by accusing their opponents of thievery. If he survives, maybe Al will forget Carville's bad counsel and seek to restore the progressive wing of his party -- if only out of political expediency. Perhaps, but I doubt it. A Bush presidency would be fine with me because it would be tainted as hell. Let the baby have his arsenic-laced bottle. The political ugliness would be a thing of beauty. And with both sides sniping away at one another, we might be able to shame them into some sort of campaign-finance reform. Then maybe the Dems would abandon the Democratic Leadership Committee's habit of Lewinskying Big Business and leave corporate whoredom back on the capable knees of the Grand Old Prostitute.

For now, the corporate world has more influence on our government than all the voters combined. It will stay that way until the system is reformed. Under the current plan, politicians sell out to huge money so they can have enough funds to properly mislead voters about their true identities. For instance, just convincing people that Gore's running mate, Joe Lieberman, is a Democrat cost the party in the low eight figures this year.

Debate commissions with corporate-sponsored events on multinational networks are happy to exclude anyone but brand-name candidates. And so an entire presidential campaign passed without people knowing there are sensible alternatives on crucial issues.

No matter how this shakes out, the power elite is already assured that the next president is a signed-on participant in the Drug McCarthyism that is being used to destroy freedoms once considered sacred in this country. The search-and-seizure laws have turned police departments from protecting and serving to looting and pillaging. Cops confiscate property so shamelessly these days that they'd make the Sheriff of Nottingham blush. Under the current regime of our purportedly progressive Democratic administration two million Americans languish in jails. By comparison China has about half that number of prisoners. Tianenmen Squared.

With Bush or Gore in office expect even more Americans to be imprisoned by the next presidential race. Whoever finally wins is a guaranteed proponent of capital punishment, which has been shown to be as fallible as it is racist. Both finalists in the Wasted Source of Solar Power State Sweepstakes make claims to caring about the environment but neither's ever met a military appropriation he wouldn't sign. Without doubt, the gravest threat to the environment is our rotting stockpile of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Did either major candidate mention this inevitable nightmare even once? Has either put forth a timetable for a cleanup? If so, I missed it.

Then there's the matter of humongous agribusiness and the litany of environmental, public-health and animal-rights offenses they commit. All Al and W. know is that Big Agribiz checks always clear.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the sanctions that the Clinton Administration has carried over from the Bush Administration. Sadaam Hussein hasn't missed either a meal or a dose of medicine as a result of this needless cruelty. But needless cruelty is the rule of the day, whether in Iraq, the Texas death chamber, or the homes (if they have them) of America's poor who now are beginning to lose food stamps and other minimal life-sustaining benefits as a result of the Clinton/Gore so-called "welfare reform."

How about some Pentagon reform? There's a lot more money to be saved and a lot fewer people would go hungry if we put the munitions appropriation process under the same scrutiny with which we examine the poor.

This fall, the big health-care debate concerned how to finance the over-medication of our seniors so that drug companies can continue to profiteer at the expense of this vulnerable and ignored sector of our society. If seniors really need drugs, they should be available for free in a single-payer national health-care system. But neither candidate would ever have the courage to work towards such sanity.

So even if my boy Al Gore wins Florida, we have already lost the election of 2000 save for the fact that Ralph Nader and thousands of committed Americans brought some idealism back to the campaign trail. Along the way, they raised a lot of issues that may have to be considered the next time losing 97,000 votes in Florida could make a big difference in an election.

I think that the situation in Florida has opened a lot of eyes, and I believe that if handled correctly it can signal the return of winning political progressiveness to the American scene.

Like I was saying to Yoko the other night: Power to the people, right on!

Barry Crimmins is Boston's most-fabled social commentator, now living in self-imposed exile in the Midwest. Check out the Crimmins Web site at http://www.barrycrimmins.com

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