The power of a social movement can beat the GOP double Chickenhawks by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman November 2, 2006
It's never been more true that the one thing we Americans can say with pride about George W. Bush is that we have never elected him president of the United States.
The regime is even more despised than ever, in part because the derogatory term "chickenhawk" now applies in all its worst double meanings.
And while Bush and Karl Rove crow that they're about to "win" again, we think they are about to run into their worst nightmare: a full-blown grassroots social movement.
The GOP strategy for stealing 2006 is much the same as in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, and in key Senatorial elections in 2002: mass disenfranchisement of mostly urban Democratic voters, combined with mass inflation of mostly rural Republican votes.
The primary tools for disenfranchisement include the decimation of voter registration lists and outright harassment of would-be Democratic voters. In Ohio alone, there has been the electronic disenfranchisement of some ten percent of the state's registered voters, along with the virtual abolition of the recount process. The attack also includes trashing ballots once cast, combined with fraudulent tabulations and rigged electronic voting machines whose software is kept secret.
The theft is hidden behind the escalating abolition of public reporting mechanisms. In 2006, this will include the virtual elimination of major media support for exit polling. Other staples of public reporting will also be crippled, as is now happening in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Ohio, and elsewhere around the US. Needless to say, there is much much more.
The GOP cover line is familiar. Bush/Rove now claim published pre-election polls are inaccurate. As they push/pull the vote count they will explain away unlikely Republican margins in rural areas by conjuring up mythological hordes of "evangelical voters." America hosts, to be sure, many millions of right-wing Christian voters. But as we have seen in our preliminary examinations of the 2004 ballots, the decisive numbers attributed to them may well exist only in the minds of the corporate media, in rigged loaves & fishes ballot counts, and in the Holy Ghost memory cards of electronic voting machines that cannot be monitored.
The GOP is desperate to keep control of both the Senate and the House. The realest terrors the Republicans face are public investigations into the astounding sinkhole of military, financial, insider theft, predatory sex, educational, ecological and other catastrophes they have wrought. Rarely in U.S. history has a single scrum of dirty tricksters evoked such widespread, abject hatred, for such good reason.
Part of the public ferocity is now doubly bound in the epithet "chickenhawk."
In the Vietnam era, it referred to war hawks like Bush, Rove, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other dubious draft dodgers who preached patriotism and war while chickening out on their own military service. In the public mind, there is no hotter place in hell than for hypocrites who send others to die in battles they won't fight themselves.
Chickenhawk is also nasty street slang for despicable sex offenders who prey on children. The exposure of Republican Congressman Mark Foley's ghastly pursuit of Congressional pages reveals an astonishing streak of personal and political hypocrisy. Like so many of his fellow sex-obsessed neo-puritan GOP gay-bashers, Foley is gay himself. He is the ultimate poster boy for "moral values" conservatism.
Now we face the question of whether the Democrats will carry one or both houses of Congress. Immoderate, intemperate and incompetent at everything except stealing elections, the GOP has ruled the executive, judicial and legislative branches, as well as the corporate media, with an iron fist. The checks and balances so carefully crafted by the Founders have been obliterated. The consequences have been predictable.
From Iraq to the deficits, from insider theft to pompous theocrats, from the decimation of the environment to the destruction of our educational system, from the dictatorial shredding of our Constitution to the smug arrogance of the sanctimoniously ignorant., the US has never been saddled with a more thoroughly rapacious national regime.
Other US elections have been stolen. But none with such organized thuggery, or such a clear eye to permanent Rovian domination. These were not meant to be one-time thefts. The hacked voting machines, ex-felon disenfranchisement, Jim Crow intimidation, deliberately confusing butterfly ballots and other sinister tricks from Jeb Bush's Florida 2000 have morphed and multiplied. In our on-the-ground studies of Ohio 2004, we have documented scores of distinct tactics used to steal our state's electoral votes. More become obvious every day. Like a cancer, they've spread nationwide.
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