When Michael Moore wrote his tongue in cheek book, Stupid White Men, it was before 9/11 and the Iraq War, when the biggest concern was how George Bush and his operatives stole the 2000 election.How he got away with it is mind boggling, when the deceit was so apparent. A fraudulent president and eight years of a fraudulent government.
Al Gore Should Have Been President
Al Gore received 539,898 more votes than George W. Bush. So how did George W. Bush, become what Moore called the Thief-in-Chief?
Somebody pass me the universal remote! I need to switch back to the fairy tale that I was a citizen in a democracy with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals. The story I was told as a child said that I mattered, that I was equal to every one of my fellow citizens—and that not a single one of us was to be treated differently or unfairly, that no one was to wield power over others without their consent. The will of the people .... (1)Because though it was clear that Gore had won the election, it would be George W Bush who sat in the oval office for eight years. But there were a lot of people behind the scenes who made this deception possible.
Katherine Harris and Database Technologies
In the summer of 1999 Katherine Harris, who was both George W. Bush's presidential campaign co chairwoman and the Florida secretary of state in charge of elections, paid $4 million to Database Technologies to go through Florida's voter rolls and remove anyone "suspected" of being a former felon. She did so with the blessing of the governor of Florida, George Ws brother Jeb Bush—whose own wife was caught by immigration officials trying to sneak $19,000 worth of jewelry into the country without declaring and paying tax on it ... a felony in its own right.
Florida law states that ex-felons cannot vote in Florida. And sadly (though I'm confident that Florida's justice system was always unimpeachably fair), that means 31 percent of all black men in Florida are prohibited from voting because they have a felony on their record. Harris and Bush knew that removing the names of ex-felons from the voter rolls would keep thousands of black citizens out of the voting booth. Black Floridians, overwhelmingly, are Democrats—and sure enough, Al Gore received the votes of more than 90 percent of them on November 7, 2000. That is, 90 percent of those who were allowed to vote.Harris's office told Database—a firm with strong Republican ties—to cast as wide a net as possible to get rid of these voters. Her minions instructed the company to include even people with "similar" names to those of the actual felons. They insisted Database check people with the same birth dates as known felons, or similar Social Security numbers; an 80 percent match of relevant information was sufficient for Database to add a voter to the ineligible list.
In what appears to be a mass fraud committed by the state of Florida, Bush, Harris, and company not only removed thousands of black felons from the rolls, they also removed thousands of black citizens who had never committed a crime in their lives—along with thousands of eligible voters who had committed only misdemeanors.
These orders were shocking, even to Bush-friendly Database. They would mean that thousands of legitimate voters might be barred from voting on Election Day just because they had a name that sounded like someone else's, or shared a birthday with some unknown bank robber. Marlene Thorogood, the Database project manager, sent an E-mail to Emmett "Bucky" Mitchell, a lawyer for Katherine Harris's election division, warning him that "Unfortunately, programming in this fashion may supply you with false positives," or misidentifications.
Never mind that, said ol' Bucky. His response: "Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren't matches and let [county election] supervisors make a final determination rather than exclude certain matches altogether."
Database did as they were told. And before long 173,000 registered voters in Florida were permanently wiped off the voter rolls. In Miami-Dade, Florida's largest county, 66 percent of the voters who were removed were black. In Tampa's county, 54 percent of those who would be denied the right to vote on November 7, 2000, were black.
The Harper government also began playing with the voting rules in Canada, making it harder for the disenfranchised to exercise their democratic rights, by demanding specific identification:
Asked who likely benefitted from the new rule, one of the case's plaintiffs, Victoria activist Rose Henry, said, "The people who have their identification. The people who would have been voting in favour of the current government in power." People who are housed and in well paying jobs, she added.
People who are struggling in the current system, the people with the most to gain from a change in government, were likely left out, she said, if not scared off by the new rules. "I think a lot of people just didn't bother voting," she said. "It disenfranchised a lot of people who normally would go out and vote. . . Was this the government's way of ensuring the party they wanted to get in got in?"
The Republicans, during the 2000 campaign, to assist Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris, also had another state confirm claims against felons, moving even more black people from the voter lists. That state of course was Texas:
This entire incident stunk to the high heavens, but the American media ignored it. It took the British Broadcasting Corporation to dig deep into this story, running fifteen-minute segments on its prime-time news program revealing all the sordid details and laying responsibility for the scam right at the doorstep of Governor Jeb Bush. It's a sad day when we have to look to a country 5,000 miles away to find out the truth about our own elections. (Eventually the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post picked up the story, but it received little attention.)
This assault on the voting rights of minorities was so widespread in Florida that it even affected people like Linda Howell. Linda received a letter informing her that she was a felon—and therefore advising her not to bother showing up on Election Day, because she would be barred from voting. The only problem was, Linda Howell wasn't a felon—in fact, she was the elections supervisor of Madison County, Florida! She and other local election officials tried to get the state to rectify the problem, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. They were told that everyone who complained about being prevented from voting should submit themselves for fingerprinting—and then let the state determine whether or not they were felons.
And in the same way that 450,000 Canadian voters were turned awayon election day in Canada in 2008, on November 7, 2000, black Floridians flocked to the polls in record numbers, many were met at the ballot boxes with a blunt rebuke: "You cannot vote."
In a number of precincts in Florida's inner cities, the polling locations were heavily fortified with police to block anyone on Katherine and Deb's "felons list" from voting. Hundreds of law-abiding citizens looking to exercise their constitutional right to vote, mostly in black and Hispanic communities, were sent away—and threatened with arrest if they protested.Fox News Joins in With the Deception
On election night, after the polls closed, there was a lot of confusion over what was happening with the counting of the votes in Florida. Finally a decision was made by the man in charge of the election night desk for the Fox News Channel. He decided that Fox should go on the air and declare that Bush had won Florida and thus the election. And that's what happened. Fox formally declared Bush the winner.
But down in Tallahassee, the counting of the votes had not yet been completed; in fact, the Associated Press insisted it was still too close to call, and refused to follow Fox's lead. Not so the other networks. They ran like lemmings after Fox made the call, afraid that they would be seen as slow or out of the loop—even though their own news reporters on the ground were insisting that it was too early to call the election. But who needs reporters when you're playing follow the leader—the leader, in this case, being John Ellis, the man in charge of Fox's election coverage.Once Ellis made the call and everyone followed suit, there was no going back making it difficult for Al Gore to challenge the premature election results He was being petty asking for recounts. A sore loser.
Who is John Ellis? He's a first cousin of George W and Jeb Bush. (1)
But in the meantime the Bush team was going after the holy grail—the overseas absentee votes.
Another fraud. But they weren't done yet. They launched a PR campaign suggesting tath Al Gore was against th troops, simply because he was trying to follow election laws. "If they catch a bullet, or fragment from a terrorist bomb, that fragment does not have any postmark or registration of any kind."Many of these ballots would come from the military, which typically votes Republican, and would finally give Bush the lead that denying the vote to thousands of blacks and Jewish grandmothers hadn't. Gore knew this, and tried to make sure the ballots underwent maximum scrutiny before they could be counted. Florida law ... is pretty clear about this ... It states that overseas absentee ballots can only be counted if they were cast and signed on or before election day, and mailed and postmarked from another country by election day.
A July 2001 investigation by the New York Times showed that of the 2,490 overseas ballots that ended up being included in the certified election results, 680 were considered flawed and questionable. Bush got the overseas vote by a ratio of 4 to 5. By that percentage, 544 of the votes that went to Bush should have been thrown out. Got the math? Suddenly Bush's "winning margin" of 537 votes is down to a chilly negative 7.
And when the Supreme Court recount tarted to turn in Gore's favour:
On the morning of Saturday, December 9, 2000, the Supreme Court got word that the recounts in Florida, in spite of everything the Bush camp had done to fix the elections, were going in favor of Al Gore. By 2 P.m., the unofficial tally showed that Gore was catching up to Bush—"only 66 votes down, and gaining!" as one breathless newscaster put it. It was critical to Bush that the words "Al Gore is in the lead" never be heard on American television: With only moments to spare, they did what they had to do. At 2:45 that afternoon, the Supreme Court stopped the recount.One of the worst frauds in American history. And whn Geoge Bush claimed his unearned right to sit in the Oval Office there was no honour amoung thieves.
On the Court sat Reagan appointee Sandra Day O'Connor and Nixon appointee Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Both in their seventies, they were hoping to retire under a Republican administration so that their replacements would share their onservative
ideology. On election night, O'Connor was heard lamenting at a party in Georgetown that she couldn't hold out another four—or eight—years. Junior Bush was their only hope for securing a contented retirement in their home state of Arizona.
Meanwhile, two other justices with extremist right-wing viewpoints found themselves with a conflict of interest. Justice Clarence Thomas's wife, Virginia Lamp Thomas, worked at the Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank in D.C.; now, she has just been hired by George W. Bush to help recruit people to serve in his impending administration. And Eugene Scalia, the son of Justice Antonin Scalia, was a lawyer with the firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher—the very law firm representing Bush before the Supreme Court!
But neither Thomas nor Scalia saw any conflict of interest, and they refused to remove themselves from the case. In fact, when the Court convened later, it was Scalia who issued the now-infamous explanation of why the ballot-counting had to be halted: "The counting of votes that are of questionable legality does, in my view, threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election." In other words, if we let all the votes be counted and they come out in Gore's favor, and Gore wins, well, that will impair Bush's ability to govern once we install him as "President."
Fitting....20,000 protesters jeered Bush every inch of the way. Holding signs denouncing Bush for stealing the election, the rain-soaked demonstrators were the conscience of the nation. Bush's limousine could not avoid them. Instead of cheering crowds of supporters, he was greeted by good people moved to remind this illegitimate ruler that he did not win the election—and that the people would never forget.
At the traditional point where Presidents since Jimmy Carter have stopped their limos and emerged to walk the last four blocks (as a reminder that we are a nation ruled not by kings but by, uh, equals), Bush's triple-armored black car with its dark-tinted windows—favored by mobsters everywhere—came to an abrupt halt. The crowd grew louder—"HAIL TO THE THIEF!"You could see the Secret Service and Bush's advisers huddling in the freezing rain, trying to figure out what to do. If Bush got out and walked, he would be booed, shouted down, and pelted with eggs the rest of the way. The limousine sat there for what must have been five minutes. The rain poured. Eggs and tomatoes hit the car. The protesters dared Bush to step out and face them.
Then, suddenly, the President's car bolted and tore down the street. The decision had been made—hit the gas and get past this rabble as quickly as possible. The Secret Service agents running beside the limo were left behind, the car's tires splashing dirty rain from the street onto the men who were there to protect its passenger. It might have been the finest thing I have ever witnessed in Washington, D.C.—a pretender to the American throne forced to turn tail and run from thousands of American citizens armed only with the Truth and the ingredients of a decent omelet. (1)
Sources:
1 . Stupid White Men: And Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Union, By: Michael Moore, Regan Books, 2001, ISBN: 0-06-039245-2, Pg. 1-15
2. New Rules Stopped 450,000 Canadians from Voting: Upped ID requirements may have affected some close federal races, By Andrew MacLeod, The Tyee, February 9 2009
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