“Group hypnotism, mob leadership, call it what you will, was never more easy than in this day of syndicated press and national hookup. And democracy may find this new world an even more unhealthy place in which to survive than it has been for the last one hundred years.”
CIA asset George “Esty” Estabrooks in Hypnotism, 1943

On November 26th, James Baker III stood before the television cameras and said: “it is time to honor the will of the people.” Well, hallelujah! Finally, a voice of sanity somewhere in the vast wasteland of the American media. At long last, someone with the courage and integrity and basic human decency to stand before the nation and offer a voice of reason.

But wait! It turns out that it was some kind of sick joke. Jimbo was just pulling our leg. What he really wanted was for the will of the people to be flagrantly ignored by granting the presidency to George W. Bush. For if the will of the people were truly respected by the likes of Baker, he would have advised his candidate to step aside long ago.

The will of the people was, without question, that Al Gore should serve as our next president. This is an indisputable fact that cannot be denied and will not go away, no matter how much propaganda is foisted on the American people by the Washington crowd and their fully-owned media subsidiaries.

This is true even if we give the Bush team every possible benefit of the doubt – even if we assume that there was no deliberate fraud in the state of Florida, that the results certified by Katherine “what cabinet post am I getting?” Harris are accurate, and that every qualified ballot cast has been accurately counted and recorded.

Consider the fact that Gore finished with a small, though unmistakable margin of victory in the national popular vote tally, roughly three times Kennedy’s margin of victory in the frequently referenced 1960 election. Clearly then, in terms of the popular vote, the will of the people favored a Gore presidency. Of course, in a real democracy, that would be enough to decide the election.

We all know, however, that this is not a real democracy, so mysterious and wise ‘electors’ – who know far better than we what is best for us – are selected to decide who our president should be. And this, according to the media and the Washington establishment, is a good thing. Why, it’s the way we’ve always done things, and everyone knows that this is the greatest damned democracy in the world.

But, you ask, isn’t the Electoral College an archaic, undemocratic institution? That may be so, they say, but those are the rules that we’ve always played by and we can’t go changing them now. But why, you ask, if we call ourselves a democracy – if we in fact hold ourselves up to the world as an ideal democracy – would we not rid ourselves of an undemocratic ‘aberration’?

We can’t do that, they say, because it’s unfair to change the rules just because you don’t like the outcome. But, you ask, if it’s truly democracy that we aspire to, isn’t it our duty to change the rules if those rules support an undemocratic outcome? No, they say, the rules must be followed. But, you ask, by saying that the rules are more important than the actual exercise of democracy, aren’t you acknowledging that you are a fascist? And they say nothing.

For the sake of argument, though, we will continue to give Bush the benefit of the doubt and entertain the ludicrous fantasy that the Electoral College has a legitimate place in a democracy. What then does the College have to say? Prior to the certification of Florida’s votes, Gore held 267 electoral votes out of a possible 538. If you do the math, you’ll find that even without Florida, Gore was less than 1/2 of 1 percent shy of the electoral majority needed to win.

Even so, ‘close’ doesn’t count, and Florida’s electoral votes give Bush a small margin of victory in the Electoral College. There is a catch, though: the improbably narrow margin of victory in the Florida popular vote that gives him the infinitesimal lead in electoral votes is dependent upon several thousand ballots being miscast.

As previously stated, we are giving Bush every benefit of the doubt with regards to voter fraud. What is not in doubt though is that a good number of elderly voters – some of them survivors of the Nazi holocaust – cast their ballots for Hitler apologist Pat Buchanan, which many ‘conservatives’ seem to find gut-bustingly funny. Even assuming that this was just an honest mistake, the fact remains that the intent of these voters was, by all accounts, to cast their ballots for Al Gore.

And the plain fact is that those votes, had they been properly cast, would have given the state to Gore, even before any of the recounts adjusted the supposed margin of victory. The simple truth, then, is that the intent of the voters in Florida, and therefore the will of the people of that state, was that Gore should accede to the throne.

Even the most die-hard of Bush flacks cannot deny this fact, though the conscienceless Baker turned it on its head in an absolutely craven attempt to justify the spectacle of an arrogant and shameless little man delivering an ersatz acceptance speech after losing the popular vote and achieving the narrowest of electoral victories based on what can – in the most charitable light – best be described as a mistake.

What sort of character must a man possess to pompously propel himself to power under such conditions? What kind of man would so presumptuously declare himself the winner with a paper-thin victory based on an admitted mistake, and feel no shame in doing so? And what sort of media would be a party to such a brazen disregard for the will of the people, the same people that candidate Bush claimed to trust?

The most inflammatory and disinformational coverage of this election fiasco has come from, not surprisingly, the foaming-at-the-mouth denizens of talk radio – the mouthpieces of the ultra-right. But can we really expect anything more from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, whose lies are so transparent that he deliberately and consciously avoids any situation where he might have to actually defend his views?

The Limbaugh clones are not alone, however. Coverage from the cable news networks has been only slightly less inflammatory. This really shouldn’t surprise anyone, however, save for those Americans who live in some sort of parallel universe wherein the nation is plagued by a ‘liberal’ press. To see just how preposterous this belief is, consider who controls the flow of information flooding the cable airwaves.

CNN, the reigning king of the cable titans, is soon to be owned by AOL. A quick peek at the Board of Directors of AOL reveals a rather curious fact: it seems to be heavily populated by such notorious bleeding-heart liberals as General Alexander Haig and General Colin Powell. CNN is, in other words, closely affiliated with a board that includes the designated Secretary of State of the proposed Bush administration, as well as the man who served as Secretary of State in the Reagan/Bush administration.

It’s easy to see, then, how CNN could be guilty of harboring a ‘liberal’ bias. The same could be said of MSNBC, which is co-owned by Bill Gates, a man who has been at war – by outward appearances anyway – with the Clintion/Gore Justice Department for a number of years now. Then there is the third major cable news entity, Fox News, owned by one of the most openly fascistic players in the business world, Rupert Murdoch.

Assisting Murdoch in putting a ‘liberal’ slant on this year’s election coverage was none other than John Ellis, kissing cousin to George, Jeb (aka John Ellis Bush), Marvin and Neil. All three of the cable networks, to put it bluntly, have a vested interest in propelling Bush into power, and none of them can by any stretch of the imagination be considered an objective source of news, ‘liberal’ or otherwise.

Even these thoroughly corrupt propaganda fronts, though, seemed a bit disturbed when the Bush team sent in a band of hired thugs – taking orders from a mobile command post – to physically disrupt the court-ordered recounting of ballots. Some in the political and media establishment seemed to be a little concerned that deciding an election by threats of mob violence might have been stepping over the line.

Not too concerned though to expose the fact that the grab for power by Sir George is increasingly resembling an unabashedly fascist coup. The print media has been just as shameless as the broadcast media in covering up this fact, and in struggling to legitimize the ‘victory’ of the Bush team.

The Los Angeles Times, long alleged to be a pillar of the ‘liberal’ media, is fairly typical of the hideously biased print coverage of the fraudulent election. Since election day, two categories of images have dominated the pages of the venerableTimes.

The first is flattering, presidential looking photos of George Bush, sometimes alone and sometimes accompanied by a much smaller, and generally less flattering, photo of Al Gore. The intent is clearly to psychologically manipulate the people into accepting a Bush presidency, while relegating Gore to also-ran status.

The other dominant image, presented incessantly, is that of bug-eyed and confused looking local officials and precinct workers staring incoherently up at contested ballots as if trying to somehow divine the intentions of voters. The effect is to make a mockery of the hand recounts, despite the fact that hand counting ballots has been the universally accepted method of resolving election disputes for the entire history of this country.

The depths of depravity to which the print and broadcast media are willing to stoop is breathtaking. What though of the ‘real’ voices of liberalism in this country? What of the so-called alternative media? And what of the ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ editorialists, columnists and pundits?

Those who have not come out of the fascist closet to endorse an illegitimate presidency have largely remained silent. Some have meekly protested the actions of the Bush operatives, while generally ignoring their more flagrantly undemocratic shenanigans, such as allowing two Republican Party hacks unrestricted and unsupervised access to Republican absentee ballot applications in Seminole County, in flagrant violation of a Florida law drafted specifically to prevent voter fraud.

And where, for that matter, are the country’s ‘liberal’ politicians? Why has Paul Wellstone not denounced the jack-boot tactics of the Bush team? Where are Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank and Tom Harkin? And what of the Great Green One? Why has the self-proclaimed candidate of the people had exactly nothing to say about the thwarting of the will of the people?

The silence of the frauds is truly stunning. Apparently their ‘liberal’ role-playing does not include denouncing the wholesale theft of an American presidential election. Such denunciations are best left, apparently, to the wild-eyed conspiracy crowd, even when the evidence is staring them directly in the face.

As for Al Gore and his ‘Democratic’ cohorts, they continue to walk the tightrope. Their Republican partners-in-crime have placed them in a very difficult position. In order to maintain the legitimacy of the ‘Democratic Party,’ they must continue to put up a reasonable semblance of a fight.

In order, though, to maintain the legitimacy of the political system as a whole, they must do so without exposing the fundamentally corrupt nature of the Bush grab for power. In that regard, the media will be a trusted ally; for in the final analysis, the media is really serving the interests of ‘both’ political parties.