Staggering to the Finish Line
Republicans are crawling at this point

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
11/4/06
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp

I was pretty sure that two days before the election, I would be doing a
"process piece" on how the various races broke down, and what the new
makeup of the House and Senate would be.

Part of the problem with that is that it would be predicated on
reasonably accurate vote counting, and I'm not sure we're going to see
that. Now that the strange "Hugo Chavez and Sequoia Voting Systems"
story has broken, right wingers have suddenly realized that having
voting machines that are easily manipulated is a two-edged sword, and
that they might not do so well in a contest that boils down to who can
steal the most votes.

At least three states are expecting utter chaos, a fall out from the
poorly-thought-out and even more poorly implemented Help America Vote
Act, and it might be worse than that. Much of the south and various red
states have no mechanism for double checking what the machines claim to
be the final tally, and so we can't assume they reflect the will of the
people.

Most of the states with electronic machines do require paper trails, and
it will be interesting to see how handcounts correlate with the computer
tallies. Worst case scenario: America spends months, perhaps years
wondering who really won, and the management at Diebold and other such
outfits go to jail. Best case: few major discrepancies, and the country
muddles through until the next election in 2008.

But what is most arresting is how utterly things have fallen apart for
the Republicans over the past month, and especially in the past few
days. Having the chart showing Iraq well on the way to chaos leak last
week, just after Putsch imposed his "benchmarks" for restoring
governance in Iraq was bad enough, but the very day after he praised
Donald Rumsfeld and ***** Cheney for the excellent job they did in Iraq,
the Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Corps Times all
ran editorials demanding Rumsfeld be dismissed for incompetence. Nothing
like that had ever happened before in American military history.

Three days before the election Vanity Fair ran an amazing article.
Julian Borger, writing for the London Guardian, reported, "Richard Perle
and Kenneth Adelman, who were both Pentagon advisers before the war,
Michael Rubin, a former senior official in the Pentagon's Office of
Special Plans, and David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, were among
the neoconservatives who recanted to Vanity Fair magazine in an article
that could influence Tuesday's battle for the control of Congress."

Back in the sixties, we had a different name for neoconservatives. We
ironically called them "the best and the brightest". Back then, they
called themselves liberal, but they had the same dream of a sort of
enlightened American hegemony, a benign empire that would bring freedom
and democracy to the savages. Previous incarnations of this philosophy
were called "manifest destiny" and "the white man's burden." It never
worked out well in the past, and it certainly isn't working out well
now. But like all true ideologues, Perle, Adleman, etc., don't see any
deficiency in their ideas: the problem, as they see it, is that the
entire Putsch junta was riddled with incompetence and corruption, and
their grand vision collapsed as a result of the administration's
mishandling of - well, just about everything. They were half right:
while it would have failed anyway, Putsch and his administration made
sure it failed catastrophically.

There was an ongoing drumbeat of Republicans and their allies falling to
scandal. Congressman Ney, under pressure since his conviction to resign,
finally did - four days before the election. Ann Coulter, mostly through
her own intransigence, refused to talk to a Florida DA about
irregularities in her 2004 ballot, and now faces felony charges of voter
fraud. Some televangelist, one Ted Haggard, got popped for soliciting a
gay prostitute and dealing with meth. It's not unusual for
televangelists to consort with prostitutes or be closeted gays, but
Teddy managed to combine the two hobbies. The meth, of course, was a
whole new wrinkle. If there was one good thing to be said about meth
heads, it was that they weren't televangelists. Now they don't even have
that going for them.

A major world wide poll came out, showing that except for Osama bin
Laden, Putsch was the world leader most seen as a threat to peace. He
beat out Ahmadinejad and Kim Il-Jong for the dubious distriction.

Israel, widely seen as a major reason America is embroiled in the middle
east, had their own scandals. Their prime minister is facing charges of
multiple violent rape. They gunned down a dozen women in front of a
mosque, killing two. A report came out claiming that Israeli troops had
killed 540 Palestinian civilians in the 14 months prior.

But perhaps the most serious scandal, and one that has potentially
deadly consequences, began last March and erupted yesterday. Some
Republican nitwits in Congress, intent on showing that Saddam did want
to build WMDs, put a bunch of documents from 1991 that supposedly
detailed Saddam's efforts to procure nuclear weapons. Unfortunately,
that's not all the documents showed. According to CBS, "The site has
posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves:
detailed accounts of Iraq's secret nuclear research before the 1991
Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic
guide to building an atom bomb. The documents, roughly a dozen in
number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about
bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond
what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums.
For instance, the papers
give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and
triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs."

Oops. Say, didn't the US execute a couple of people in the 50s for doing
something like that? "It was a goofy idea, releasing all that sensitive
stuff in the current climate with Iran supposedly trying to build a
nuclear bomb," one diplomat told the London Guardian. He went on to
describe it as 'crass stupidity'. As if using 1991 documents to justify
an American attack, invasion and occupation of Iraq 12 years later wasn't.

Terrorists won't even have to translate: the manuals were in Arabic. And
thanks to Pakistan and Russia, there's lots of bomb building materials
around.

Rupert Murdoch, probably hoping to stir up a little fear and help his
GOP buddies, ran a screaming headline in the London Times, a former
newspaper, which read, "Six Arab states join rush to go nuclear"

Between Putsch's policy of only attacking states that can't fire back,
and the GOP Congress' decision to put detailed documents on how to build
a nuclear weapon in Arabic on the web, this isn't exactly a surprise to
anyone. Incidently, neither the Murdoch-owned Times nor
Drudge, who linked to this, mentioned the on-line documents.

This is a major story, and you'll be hearing a lot more about it over
the next few months. But for now, it's just one more hurdle the GOP has
to overcome on Tuesday.

That is the one good thing about fascism: it is so corrupt and
inflexible that it always self destructs. With luck, it has done so in
time to spare America another twelve years of horror.

Staggering to the Finish Line
Republicans are crawling at this point

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
11/4/06
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp

I was pretty sure that two days before the election, I would be doing a
"process piece" on how the various races broke down, and what the new
makeup of the House and Senate would be.

Part of the problem with that is that it would be predicated on
reasonably accurate vote counting, and I'm not sure we're going to see
that. Now that the strange "Hugo Chavez and Sequoia Voting Systems"
story has broken, right wingers have suddenly realized that having
voting machines that are easily manipulated is a two-edged sword, and
that they might not do so well in a contest that boils down to who can
steal the most votes.

At least three states are expecting utter chaos, a fall out from the
poorly-thought-out and even more poorly implemented Help America Vote
Act, and it might be worse than that. Much of the south and various red
states have no mechanism for double checking what the machines claim to
be the final tally, and so we can't assume they reflect the will of the
people.

Most of the states with electronic machines do require paper trails, and
it will be interesting to see how handcounts correlate with the computer
tallies.