Isn't it lovely?

Spreading freedom to Afghanistan and suppressing it at home.

The Dem's are considering handing out free brass knuckles to all
registered voters so they can use them to punch the GOP brownshirts in
the face when they get to the polling station.

The violence that didn't happen at the GOP convention in NY may have
just been building pressure. The Reupugnents seem to be itching for a
fight ... it seems to they'll be in for a doozy of a one come Nov. 2.

And they'll have earned it too.

--------------------------------------------------------

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A707-2004Oct26.html

The GOP's Shameful Vote Strategy

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, October 27, 2004; Page A25

With Election Day almost upon us, it's not clear whether President Bush
is running a campaign or plotting a coup d'etat. By all accounts,
Republicans are spending these last precious days devoting nearly as
much energy to suppressing the Democratic vote as they are to mobilizing
their own.

Time was when Republicans were at least embarrassed by their efforts to
keep African Americans from the polls. Republican consultant Ed Rollins
was all but drummed out of the profession after his efforts to pay black
ministers to keep their congregants from voting in a 1993 New Jersey
election came to light.

For George W. Bush, Karl Rove and their legion of genteel thugs,
however, universal suffrage is just one more musty liberal ideal that
threatens conservative rule. Today's Republicans have elevated vote
suppression from a dirty secret to a public norm.

In Ohio, Republicans have recruited 3,600 poll monitors and assigned
them disproportionately to such heavily black areas as inner-city
Cleveland, where Democratic "527" groups have registered many tens of
thousands of new voters. "The organized left's efforts to, quote
unquote, register voters -- I call them ringers -- have created these
problems" of potential massive vote fraud, Cuyahoga County Republican
Chairman James P. Trakas recently told the New York Times.

Let's pass over the implication that a registration drive waged by a
liberal group is inherently fraud-ridden, and look instead at that word
"ringers."

Registration in Ohio is nonpartisan, but independent analysts estimate
that roughly 400,000 new Democrats have been added to the rolls this
year. Who does Trakas think they are? Have tens of thousands of African
Americans been sneaking over the state lines from Pittsburgh and Detroit
to vote in Cleveland -- thus putting their own battleground states more
at risk of a Republican victory? Is Shaker Heights suddenly filled with
Parisians affecting American argot? Or are the Republicans simply
terrified that a record number of minority voters will go to the polls
next Tuesday? Have they decided to do anything to stop them -- up to and
including threatening to criminalize Voting While Black in a
Battleground State?

This is civic life in the age of George W. Bush, in which politics has
become a continuation of civil war by other means. In Bush's America,
there's a war on -- against a foreign enemy so evil that we can ignore
the Geneva Conventions, against domestic liberals so insidious that we
can ignore democratic norms. Only bleeding hearts with a pre-Sept. 11
mind-set still believe in voting rights.

For Bush and Rove, the domestic war predates the war on terrorism. From
the first day of his presidency, Bush opted to govern from the right, to
fan the flames of cultural resentment, to divide the American house
against itself in the hope that cultural conservatism would create a
stable Republican majority. The Sept. 11 attacks unified us, but Bush
exploited those attacks to relentlessly partisan ends. As his foreign
and domestic policies abjectly failed, Bush's reliance on identity
politics only grew stronger. He anointed himself the standard-bearer for
provincials and portrayed Kerry and his backers as arrogant
cosmopolitans.

And so here we are, improbably enmeshed in a latter-day version of the
election of 1928, when the Catholicism of Democratic presidential
nominee Al Smith bitterly divided the nation along Protestant-Catholic
and nativist-immigrant lines. To his credit, Smith's opponent (and
eventual victor), Herbert Hoover, did not exploit this rift himself.
Bush, by contrast, has not merely exploited the modernist-traditionalist
tensions in America but helped create new ones and summoned old ones we
could be forgiven for thinking were permanently interred. (Kerry will
ban the Bible?)

Indeed, it's hard to think of another president more deliberately
divisive than the current one. I can come up with only one other
president who sought so assiduously to undermine the basic arrangements
of American policy (as Bush has undermined the New Deal at home and the
systems of post-World War II alliances abroad) with so little concern
for the effect this would have on the comity and viability of the
nation. And Jefferson Davis wasn't really a president of the United
States.

After four years in the White House, George W. Bush's most significant
contribution to American life is this pervasive bitterness, this
division of the house into raging, feuding halves. We are two nations
now, each with a culture that attacks the other. And politics, as the
Republicans are openly playing it, need no longer concern itself with
the most fundamental democratic norm: the universal right to vote.

As the campaign ends, Bush is playing to the right and Kerry to the
center.

That foretells the course of the administrations that each would head.
The essential difference between them is simply that, as a matter of
strategy and temperament, Bush seeks to exploit our rifts and Kerry to
narrow them. That, finally, is the choice before us next Tuesday:
between one candidate who wants to pry this nation apart to his own
advantage, and another who seeks to make it whole.

meyersonh@washpost.com

© 2004 The Washington Post Company


---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.776 / Virus Database: 523 - Release Date: 10/12/04

Isn't it lovely?

Spreading freedom to Afghanistan and suppressing it at home.

The Dem's are considering handing out free brass knuckles to all registered
voters so they can use them to punch the GOP brownshirts in the face when
they get to the polling station.

The violence that didn't happen at the GOP convention in NY may have just
been building pressure. The Reupugnents seem to be itching for a fight ...
it seems to they'll be in for a doozy of a one come Nov. 2.

And they'll have earned it too.

--------------------------------------------------------

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A707-2004Oct26.html

The GOP's Shameful Vote Strategy

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, October 27, 2004; Page A25

With Election Day almost upon us, it's not clear whether President Bush is
running a campaign or plotting a coup d'etat. By all accounts, Republicans
are spending these last precious days devoting nearly as much energy to
suppressing the Democratic vote as they are to mobilizing their own.

Time was when Republicans were at least embarrassed by their efforts to keep
African Americans from the polls. Republican consultant Ed Rollins was all
but drummed out of the profession after his efforts to pay black ministers
to keep their congregants from voting in a 1993 New Jersey election came to
light.

For George W. Bush, Karl Rove and their legion of genteel thugs, however,
universal suffrage is just one more musty liberal ideal that threatens
conservative rule. Today's Republicans have elevated vote suppression from a
dirty secret to a public norm.

In Ohio, Republicans have recruited 3,600 poll monitors and assigned them
disproportionately to such heavily black areas as inner-city Cleveland,
where Democratic "527" groups have registered many tens of thousands of new
voters. "The organized left's efforts to, quote unquote, register voters --
I call them ringers -- have created these problems" of potential massive
vote fraud, Cuyahoga County Republican Chairman James P. Trakas recently
told the New York Times.

Let's pass over the implication that a registration drive waged by a liberal
group is inherently fraud-ridden, and look instead at that word "ringers."

Registration in Ohio is nonpartisan, but independent analysts estimate that
roughly 400,000 new Democrats have been added to the rolls this year. Who
does Trakas think they are? Have tens of thousands of African Americans been
sneaking over the state lines from Pittsburgh and Detroit to vote in
Cleveland -- thus putting their own battleground states more at risk of a
Republican victory? Is Shaker Heights suddenly filled with Parisians
affecting American argot? Or are the Republicans simply terrified that a
record number of minority voters will go to the polls next Tuesday? Have
they decided to do anything to stop them -- up to and including threatening
to criminalize Voting While Black in a Battleground State?

This is civic life in the age of George W. Bush, in which politics has
become a continuation of civil war by other means. In Bush's America,
there's a war on -- against a foreign enemy so evil that we can ignore the
Geneva Conventions, against domestic liberals so insidious that we can
ignore democratic norms. Only bleeding hearts with a pre-Sept. 11 mind-set
still believe in voting rights.

For Bush and Rove, the domestic war predates the war on terrorism. From the
first day of his presidency, Bush opted to govern from the right, to fan the
flames of cultural resentment, to divide the American house against itself
in the hope that cultural conservatism would create a stable Republican
majority. The Sept. 11 attacks unified us, but Bush exploited those attacks
to relentlessly partisan ends. As his foreign and domestic policies abjectly
failed, Bush's reliance on identity politics only grew stronger. He anointed
himself the standard-bearer for provincials and portrayed Kerry and his
backers as arrogant cosmopolitans.

And so here we are, improbably enmeshed in a latter-day version of the
election of 1928, when the Catholicism of Democratic presidential nominee Al
Smith bitterly divided the nation along Protestant-Catholic and
nativist-immigrant lines. To his credit, Smith's opponent (and eventual
victor), Herbert Hoover, did not exploit this rift himself. Bush, by
contrast, has not merely exploited the modernist-traditionalist tensions in
America but helped create new ones and summoned old ones we could be
forgiven for thinking were permanently interred. (Kerry will ban the Bible?)

Indeed, it's hard to think of another president more deliberately divisive
than the current one. I can come up with only one other president who sought
so assiduously to undermine the basic arrangements of American policy (as
Bush has undermined the New Deal at home and the systems of post-World War
II alliances abroad) with so little concern for the effect this would have
on the comity and viability of the nation. And Jefferson Davis wasn't really
a president of the United States.

After four years in the White House, George W. Bush's most significant
contribution to American life is this pervasive bitterness, this division of
the house into raging, feuding halves. We are two nations now, each with a
culture that attacks the other. And politics, as the Republicans are openly
playing it, need no longer concern itself with the most fundamental
democratic norm: the universal right to vote.

As the campaign ends, Bush is playing to the right and Kerry to the center.

That foretells the course of the administrations that each would head. The
essential difference between them is simply that, as a matter of strategy
and temperament, Bush seeks to exploit our rifts and Kerry to narrow them.
That, finally, is the choice before us next Tuesday: between one candidate
who wants to pry this nation apart to his own advantage, and another who
seeks to make it whole.

meyersonh@washpost.com

© 2004 The Washington Post Company


---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.776 / Virus Database: 523 - Release Date: 10/12/04

Isn't it lovely?