Those crazy Bush boys really seem to have fucked up this time. If you haven’t done so lately, get up from your computer, walk outside and take a few deep breaths. Did you catch a whiff of that stench drifting across the country? If I’m not mistaken, it seems to be coming from the state of Florida. The drive to put chosen son George W. into the White House just might have gotten a little out of control.

It’s been pretty clear for some time now that George was the chosen one. The problem was that George is a pretty tough sell as a presidential candidate. He is after all – can we be honest here? – an unfathomably stupid and shallow man. So even with enormous sums of money behind him, and the rather obvious support of the corporate media, it was an uphill battle for the Bush clan.

Winning the primary was easy enough, especially after the only real competitor – John McCain – took a dive by denouncing the Christian Coalition, the kiss of death for a Republican candidate. That left just a bunch of rather comical contenders like Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes to deal with. Keyes, by the way, was apparently supposed to represent the ‘diversity’ of the Republican Party, which he rather bizarrely did by simultaneously channeling Jesse Jackson and Pat Buchanan.

As for McCain, he had shown that even a hideously fraudulent ‘reformer’ could kick Bush’s ass in the primaries, so he had to bow out. You overplayed your part there a little bit, John. Maybe it was that whole “pity me for the mistreatment I suffered at the hands of my Vietnamese captors after I indiscriminately dumped Napalm on their children” approach. Be that as it may, with the admiral’s son out of the race, Bush basically picked up the Republican nomination by default.

The general election was a little tougher though. Senator Bob Smith could have posed a real problem when he denounced the Republican Party as too liberal for his tastes and bolted the party to run as a far-right ‘Independent.’ Fortunately though, Smith quickly saw the error of his ways and bolted back to the flock, where he was received – not surprisingly – with open arms.

The Reform Party could have posed a real problem as well. Candidate Ross Perot had, after all, siphoned off a considerable number of Republican votes in the last two presidential contests. But not this year. No, this was the year that saw the Reform Party gloriously implode, producing the ludicrously fascistic Pat Buchanan as a candidate, whose campaign commercials were so over-the-top that it’s hard to imagine anyone taking his candidacy seriously.

It was also, notably, the year that the Reform Party stopped receiving media exposure and invitations to the debates. But even with no one else in the race to tap conservative votes, Bush was such an absurd candidate that he couldn’t hope to defeat even as weak an opponent as Al Gore.

Pollsters struggled mightily to suggest otherwise. For weeks now, while calling the polls ‘statistical deadlocks,’ Bush has been portrayed as consistently out-polling Gore by a margin of from three to six points. The popular vote count showed this to be complete bullshit, however, and likely an effort to create a self-fulfilling prophecy, as well as to condition the American people to accept a Bush victory.

The truth was that getting George into the White House was not an easy task. The sudden emergence of the Green Party, which had been dormant for ages, certainly helped. Interestingly, Nader’s campaign got considerably more, and better, press than did Buchanan’s, a major shift from previous years.

But even with a spoiler on the left, and one given at least limited legitimacy, the Bush campaign was in trouble. Even though Gore seemed at times to be working on sabotaging his own campaign – such as distancing himself from Clinton, who is, despite being thoroughly corrupt, unquestionably the most popular politician in the country – Bush remained seemingly unelectable.

Even when George, Sr.’s supposed nemesis, H. Ross Perot, and George Jr.’s purported arch rival, John McCain, jumped on board the Bush team bearing ringing endorsements, the American people appeared unconvinced. Even the endorsements of such notable war criminals as Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf didn’t seem to help much.

Apparently though, those Bush boys just don’t know when to throw in the towel. The operative principal seems to have been: when all else fails, resort to massive voter fraud. And if you’re going to steal an election, where better to do it than in Jeb Bush’s Florida, where rabidly fascist anti-Castro Cubans and assorted Mafioso have long specialized in dirty tricks.

Make no mistake about it, the evidence of fraud is overwhelming. Among the numerous voting ‘irregularities’ reported are:

· Nine ballot boxes were reported missing in Broward County. This was disputed by an election supervisor, who claimed that nothing was missing, though numerous ballot boxes had taken longer to receive than expected. The official conceded though that one box was left behind at a polling station — by an inexperienced volunteer, naturally. It was later reported that at least four boxes were ‘forgotten’ overnight in Broward and Miami-Dade counties.

· Thousands of voters have reported being turned away at the polls with claims that ballots had run out, because their names had conveniently disappeared from the lists of registered voters, or because the polling locations had illegally closed with voters still waiting in line to vote; some have alleged willful destruction of ballots from Democratic precincts.

· In at least one precinct, in Leon County, the Florida Highway Patrol set up a police checkpoint near a polling place and, according to angry voters, intimidated blacks attempting to reach the polls.

· Abandoned ballot boxes seem to be popping up more frequently than Elvis sightings. Boxes were found in three different Palm Beach County schools, as well as in an upscale, gated residential community. All were allegedly empty. Another was found in a Miami church. Yet another was discovered on Friday at the Sheraton Hotel and impounded by the Miami Police.

· Also in Palm Beach, calls flooded in complaining of a confusing ballot which caused many voters to mistakenly cast their vote for Pat Buchanan rather than Gore. In the staunchly Democratic county, Buchanan received 3,407 votes, nearly three-and-a-half times his tally in any other Florida county. Given the purported margin of ‘victory’ in the state’s popular vote, these ballots alone would be enough to throw the election to Gore.

· In that same Palm Beach County, another 19,000 ballots were disqualified because voters had punched more than one hole, again due to the deceptive ballot design. These ballots presumably would have heavily favored Gore.

· Another 1,600 ballots cast primarily for Gore were voided due to what was described as a ‘computer glitch.’

· One of the men primarily responsible for getting out the Republican vote, particularly absentee ballots, was previously declared guilty of massive voter fraud in his run for mayor of Miami in 1997. So blatant was the fraud that his election victory was overturned by the courts and a number of officials were convicted.

· In Plantation, a school that was to have served as a polling place was torn down just three weeks before election day, and many voters were not informed of the location of the new polling place.

· London’s Independent has reported that a 71-year-old pastor observed two men suspiciously loitering at a polling location bearing armloads of what appeared to be ballots. The pastor told his story to the Independent after local police and reporters refused to report on or investigate his claims.

The problem now is that the fraud is so obvious as to border on the absurd. A large sector of the population has already caught a whiff of the stench wafting in from the country’s southeastern appendage, and a slew of lawsuits have already been filed by private citizens and local officials. This surely creates a bit of a problem for the Bush boys. What to do now?

They could choose to stay the course, attempting to perpetuate the fraud and sweep George into the White House, the people be damned. As the sense that something is rotten in Florida grows among the American people though, this could bring a rather hostile reaction from a fairly broad spectrum of the population. Even with Gore playing along and conceding defeat, this might not play too well.

The smarter thing to do, it seems, is to swing the election back to Gore, without of course admitting to massive voter fraud. Perhaps some voting improprieties could be admitted to, while blaming lower level, overzealous staffers. There would naturally be a good deal of hostility to Gore from the other side of the aisle, but that’s all a part of the game anyway.

A relentless attack on a Gore presidency would serve the same function as it did with the Clinton presidency – to create the illusion of a liberal administration while a reactionary agenda is pursued, thereby keeping the American ‘left’ confused and steadfastly behind another false idol. But, like I said, that would be the smart thing to do, and in case I haven’t mentioned it yet, George isn’t real bright.

That reminds me of a question I’ve been meaning to ask. The Bush family have long been big fans of eugenics programs, and have themselves been careful not to marry ‘outside their class,’ so to speak. But doesn’t the fact that generations of selective breeding have produced such an extraordinarily stupid man refute the eugenics beliefs of his forbears? Just checking.

Anyway, it seems a near certainty that with the chosen son so close to the White House, the Bush team will push on. The media will gamely play along, portraying Gore as the villain for being a whiny, poor loser. Every effort will be made to turn public opinion against the vice-president, and in favor of the Bush crime family. This is not necessarily a bad thing, however.

Even with a national media consensus for Gore to graciously step aside, a large swath of the American people will view the Bush presidency as fundamentally illegitimate. Adding to the hostility will be the overtly reactionary agenda that the Bush team will pursue, which is not to be confused with the covertly reactionary agenda pursued for the last eight years by Mr. Bill, though the results are largely the same.

Bush will likely go so far as to claim some sort of imaginary mandate from the people. And maybe, just maybe, that will be enough to awake the country from its slumber. Maybe the country needs an embarrassingly dim-witted son of an extraordinarily corrupt political family foisted into power against the will of the people through a transparently fraudulent election, and committed to pursuing a decidedly anti-democratic agenda. If that isn’t enough to get the people up off their asses, then there is little hope that anything will.