Thursday 18 September 2003

When Will Americans Realize They've Been Had?

"If you want to know the truth, I blame the Bush campaign for the death of [Lars Erik] Nelson, one of the best journalists in America. . . Nelson saw what was going on in Florida early on, and he didn't see it with any equanimity: One of his colleagues at the Daily News called him on the day of his death, the afternoon of the televised Florida Supreme Court argument, and recalled Nelson crying out, 'I can't believe they said that!' over some outrageous assertion by the lawyers for Ms. Harris and Mr. Bush."

"A few hours later, he was found in front of his television set, dead of a stroke. No one will convince me it was unrelated." - Ron Rosenbaum LINK

It's been nearly three years now, and almost as many since we were told to just "get over it." And honestly, without Sept. 11 inconsistencies or Bush's pre-planned wars or assaults on civil liberties or the hubris and arrogance and embarrassing treatment of long-held allies, many of us would have accepted the Supreme Court's decision and learned to live with the temporary hand we'd been dealt.

Instead, however, the red flags raised three years ago foretold more ominous developments. The 2000 election wasn't merely a Constitutional crisis, it was an all-American coup designed to change the United States forever. And let's not delude ourselves. While Bill Clinton's impeachment was a prequel to this takeover, voting machine snafus, the California recall and Texas redistricting are all part of a plan to usurp democracy yet again.

Even before Sept. 11, the Florida fiasco was a wake-up call. If the election had not unraveled the way it did, many of us would have never comprehended the gravity of the situation. We would have thought of Clinton's impeachment as just insane partisan politics and would most likely not have discovered how, in the wee hours of that Wednesday morning, Jeb assured George that Florida was in the bag. "Let me explain something," Al Gore reportedly said. "Your younger brother is not the ultimate authority on this." But alas, America's preferred candidate didn't realize that Katherine Harris had hired Database Technologies to scrub 90,000 folks from Florida's voter rolls.

So, yes, Fate intervened in November 2000 to tell us that something is indeed very wrong and that unless we start paying attention, we might as well kiss our democratic illusions goodbye. As it stands now, however, the election outrage was just part of a saga which, if it were a movie, would not be believed.

"Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives," Hunter S. Thompson wrote on Sept. 12, 2001, predicting that the war would morph into a continuation of the first Gulf War, which our "goofy child-President, [had] been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish." LINK

A couple months later, an unnamed source told Greg Palast that, "There is a hidden agenda at the very highest levels of our government."

Full story...