Ernest Partridge: The Gulliberal Problem

We’ve got trouble enough from our adversaries – but God save us from our friends!

Surely one of the most amazing aspects of the election fraud issue is how so many otherwise smart liberals and progressives fail to see what is right in front of their faces; namely that the key Congressional races in 2002 were stolen, that the 2004 Presidential election was stolen, and that, if business as usual prevails, the elections of 2006 and 2008 will be stolen. The voting machines are built by major Bush contributors, his “pioneers,” and their employees write the secret software and count the votes. When asked to provide proof that the vote totals are accurate, they can supply no proof, simply because that’s the way the machines are built and the software is written. “Trust us!” is the only “proof” that they can offer.

And so, when, before the 2004 election, the CEO of Diebold, Walden O’Dell, announced that he would do “all in his power” to “deliver” the deciding Ohio electoral votes to Bush, few in the mainstream media or the Democratic party seemed to notice, or care, that it was "in his power" to “deliver Ohio” in total disregard of what the voters in Ohio might want, or how they might vote.

Meet the “gulliberals” (pronounced GULlibruls): prominent Democrats, liberals, and progressives who have ears to hear but hear not, eyes to see but see not, and brains to understand but will not. Included among the gulliberals are Al Franken, Paul Begalla, Arianna Huffington, David Corn, Bernie Sanders, some writers for Salon.com and Mother Jones; admirable individuals all, who are laboring valiantly to overthrow the GOP in the next (alleged) election. Yet they are also unwitting allies with the Republican National Committee, as they say, with the GOP, “the elections were honest, so get over it!”

Add to the roster of the gulliberals, every Democrat in the Senate, and with the honorable exception of Rush Holt, John Conyers, the Congressional Black Caucus, and a very few others, virtually every Democrat in the House. Also such allied organizations such as People for the American Way and Move-On. All these prattle on about how we must all work together to take over the Congress "next time," as if they were preparing for and facing a fair contest.

So once again, Lucy props up the football, and says, "c'mon, Charlie Brown, let's see if you can kick it this time."

What's wrong with these people?!

Don't they know how to recognize simple evidence? Can't they follow an uncomplicated argument to its compelling conclusion? Answer: yes they know, and yes they can. They just refuse to do so. My best guess is that they simply can't bring themselves to face up to the enormity of the Bush/GOP crime against our democracy.

Germany, c. 1938: "Yes, I know things are tough for us Jews, but surely things can’t get much worse than this. After all, this is our country too!" Some of those who believed that things could get worse and who acted accordingly are now, along with their descendants, our neighbors and compatriots. Those who "couldn't believe," perished in the Holocaust.

How, then are we to get through to the gulliberals? With two simple questions, asked over and over, and over again until they finally face up to them:

1. Can you prove that the elections of 2000, 2002 and 2004 were not stolen?

2. Can your refute the evidence that these elections were stolen?

Name-calling ( “paranoid,” “conspiracy theorists”) does not count as evidence.

In point of fact: (1) there is no proof that the elections were, or will be, honest; not even if they were, in fact, honest, simply because that’s the way the machines and software are designed. This conclusion is supported by an October, 2005 report from none other than the non-partisan Government Accountability Office – a report virtually ignored by the mainstream media. (2) The evidence of fraud is overwhelming. University Statistics professors such as Drs. Steven Freeman, Arlene Ash, Ron Baiman, and, many more put the odds of a fair and accurate vote count in 2004 at millions to one, in effect, impossible. So too the thirty-plus percentage public opinion swings in the 2005 Ohio election that sunk three ballot reform initiatives. What part of the meaning of “impossible” do the gulliberals not understand? Add to this the demonstrable ability of hackers to alter e-vote totals without leaving the trace. One such demonstration by Bev Harris was conducted with DNC Chair Howard Dean on CNBC. Another took place last month in Florida, leading to the decertification of touch-screen machines in two counties. There is much more evidence that I have cited many times before, but quite frankly all this repetition is getting tedious. So once again, read it yourself here, here, here, and here. Or watch these excerpts from the films Votergate and Invisible Ballots.

All this leads to a compelling question: just how much weight of evidence is required to budge the gulliberals from their obstinate denial? Might it perhaps be comparable to the evidence required to convince Pat Robertson of Darwinism, Jerry Falwell of the fallibility of The Bible, or George Bush that God did not tell him to invade Iraq – which is to say, no amount of evidence at all?

Let us hope not. After all, most of the prominent gulliberals are educated and otherwise reasonable individuals. So we must put on the pressure. Call into the Franken Show. Write Arianna, and send comments to The Huffington Post. Write your Congressperson, the DNC and your local media. Hit them with these questions. And then come back and hit them again. But don’t expect much help from the media, at least not right away. We must direct most of our fire at the gulliberals. They mean well, and they want to oust the Busheviks as much as we do. So they are persuadable. Demand that they confront the evidence and either refute it or sign up with the election reform movement.

For if the Republicans and their allies in the privatized election industry can, once again, “program” any election result that they want and leave no trace of the crime, all talk of winning in November is futile, and all money and effort devoted to that result is wasted. The Republicans will win again, no matter what the public might want.

If we managed to crawl out of this hole before November, 2006 and take back our Congress, this is how it might happen:

The mainstream media will continue to lose its credibility, as more and more of our compatriots match the official propaganda against their personal experiences and memories. Colin Powell at the UN and the “Winnebagos of Death.” “Mission accomplished!” The WMDs (Rumsfeld: “We know where they are”). The “reconstituted nukes” (Cheney: “there is no doubt”). The smoking gun as a mushroom cloud. “Greeted with flowers and candies.” Judith Miller’s dispatches from Ahmed Chalabi. Bob Woodward’s indulgent portraits of “our Commander in Chief.”

For the vast majority of Americans, economic conditions are bound to get worse, sooner rather than later. Fewer and fewer will be able to afford health insurance, or be able to send their children to college. The value of their homes, their only reserve, will collapse. They will begin to feel the loss of their accustomed liberties as they will no longer write, send e-mails, use the telephone, buy books or use their public libraries with assurance of their privacy.

News of the Abramoff and other scandals will intensify, and we haven’t heard the last of Patrick Fitzgerald’s Plamegate investigations. The public will come to realize that there is simply no way to “win” the Iraq war, as the casualty figures will continue to mount up. Amidst all this, American citizens will remember what it was like to live in a country that was free, prosperous, and at peace. There is only so much that Fox News, MSNBC, right-wing talk radio, and a compliant mainstream media can do to cover-up the disastrous consequences of the Bush policies. At long last, it is not enough.

As a result of all this, it will become ever-more “fashionable” for ordinary citizens to criticize and ridicule Bush, and his favorability ratings will soon resume their inexorable downward plunge. More and more, we will hear the question, “how in the world did we elect and then re-elect this clown, along with those brigands in the Congress?” An agreeable answer will then be close at hand: “we didn’t!” The election fraud issue might then break out into the open and overcome the mainstream media’s determination to suppress and ignore it.

Today, we see harbingers of that breakthrough. The pressure of public opinion is building up under the lid of the media blackout. In the year following the 2000 election, the Gallup Poll found that from 15 to 24 percent of the public believed that Bush had stolen the election, and the CBS/ New York Times poll reported that barely more than half believed that Bush was legitimately elected in 2000. Doubts about the legitimacy of the election process have not gone away, and in fact were boosted by the 2004 election. Occasionally late-night TV comedians make jokes about it, a dangerous trend for the GOP, given that most Americans seem to get their “news” from David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, et al. Now and then a maverick pundit or commentator such as Keith Olbermann mentions the issue in the MSM. In short, there is within the American public an indelible residue of skepticism and distrust persisting from the 2000 and the 2004 elections. The mainstream media and the GOP can try to suppress it, but they can’t eliminate it. Sadly and ironically in this effort they are joined by the gulliberals.

Strange to say, those of us who are struggling to expose the great election fraud may be joined by an improbable ally: a small but significant fraction of the financial and corporate elites. For it may finally be dawning on some of the poobahs on Wall Street, and through them a few significant voices in the MSM, that they are sinking the ship that they are riding on. And that when the great ship goes down, those in the luxury cabins will be as doomed as those in steerage.

Bush's "pioneers" are, in their own way, as blind to the economic shipwreck ahead as the gulliberals are to election fraud. But the evidence in both cases is compelling. The housing bubble is about to burst, consumer credit is almost maxed-out and a sharp drop in consumer spending is certain to follow, China is abandoning the dollar, we are at peak oil and energy prices are bound to skyrocket. And the 95% of humanity living outside our borders has just about had it with our imperial fantasies and may, at any time, decide to shut down our economy without firing a shot. Europe, OPEC and the Pacific Rim can do it, and they know that they can, even if the Busheviks do not.

All this is slowly dawning on a few fat-cat movers and shakers, a very few of whom might appreciate that all their wealth is derived, ultimately, from the education, skill and labor of the rest of us, and from our shared infrastructure, institutions, and political traditions, most notably, the rule of law -- all of which are being outsourced, dismantled, and "drowned" in Grover Norquist's "bathtub." The recent impeachment editorial in Barrons may be a harbinger of this realization among a few of the elites. And so, where the law, the Constitution, simple justice and morality have failed, enlightened self-interest by the powerful and wealthy may yet come to our aid. If and when these powers-that-be finally decide to pull the plug on Bush, Inc., they can bring it down, just as they did to Nixon, Inc. They can do so simply by spreading the word, far and wide, that since 2000 (and perhaps before) elections have been irrelevant and that the regime no longer governs "with the consent of the governed." These elites, unlike us, have the media access and control to do just that.

While none of this is inevitable, all of it is possible. But only if the people act. To accomplish all this we will need the help of the gulliberals, which means that they must be persuaded to abandon their fantasy of honest elections.

But will they wake up in time to rescue our common political-economic enterprise? That's where we the public, and particularly those of us who labor in the progressive blogosphere, come in. Our voices of protest are weak, but they are grounded in evidence and hard reality. Once again, the elements of the election fraud issue are exceedingly simple: (1) the advocates of paperless e-voting cannot prove that the citizen’s vote is secure, and (2) those advocates have no plausible rebuttal to the readily available evidence, noted above, that recent national elections have been stolen. It’s as simple as that.

In a perversion of our democracy, private citizens and citizen organizations have had to take up the burden of proving that their franchise is corrupt. This is not how it should be in a healthy democracy. It should not be the obligation of the citizen to secure his or her vote; instead, that citizen should have a right to a secure ballot – a right guaranteed by that citizen’s government, and enforced by the rule of law. Thanks to the Busheviks and the GOP establishment, we do not have this right, and so we must seize it back from the privatized “election industry.”

To do this, we must write and publish relentlessly, organize, talk to all and any who will listen, and perhaps a few that won’t. We must wake up our sleeping and credulous "allies" the gulliberals, tell the Democrats that they will get no support from us unless and until they address and deal with the ballot fraud issue, and we must encourage, support, and publicize any defections from Bushism in the media and among the affluent elites.

As I have noted many times before and will say once again, the Busheviks and their allies have the wealth and the power, and they control the message. Thus the dissident cause is hopeless: as hopeless as the causes of General George Washington, of Mohandas Gandhi, of Nelson Mandella, of Andrei Sakharov, of Martin Luther King. Somehow, mysteriously, unexpectedly, the forces of history provided opportunities, and these great men had the wisdom to identify and to take advantage of these opportunities. While I find no leaders of such stature and wisdom in evidence today, crises have a way of producing such leaders. Now is the time for them to step forward, as those opportunities now come before us.

"The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice."
- Martin Luther King.

Copyright 2006 by Ernest Partridge

Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He publishes the website, "The Online Gadfly" (www.igc.org/gadfly) and co-edits the progressive website, "The Crisis Papers" ( www.crisispapers.org). His book in progress, "Conscience of a Progressive," can be seen at www.igc.org/gadfly/progressive/^toc.htm . Send comments to: crisispapers@hotmail.com.

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