“The outcome of this election will not be the result of … efforts to mold public opinion.”
George W. Bush robotically reciting a statement to the press on November 15, 2000

Actually, that is exactly what the outcome will be the result of. While the media continues to make a concerted and absolutely shameless effort to steer public opinion into supporting a Bush presidency, evidence continues to mount of a massive, well-planned (though sloppily executed) operation to steal the vote in the state of Florida, brought to you courtesy of the Bush family.

As details emerge, it is difficult to tell which is more amazing – the brazenness of the fraud perpetrated on the people of this country, or the complete refusal of the media to acknowledge what is painfully obvious. What is also obvious is that the media, and both political parties, desperately want the whole thing to go away as soon as possible.

It is not likely that it is Al Gore and his campaign team that are delaying the completion of the Bush coup. More likely, it is public outrage that has forced Gore to put up at least the illusion of a fight. Essentially, he is just buying time until public opinion can be sufficiently brought under control by the all-powerful media.

One of the more telling details to emerge concerns the role played by a Fox News official on election night. As readers will recall, the state of Florida was originally called in favor of Gore, based on the results of exit polls (a very reliable indicator assuming that ballots are accurately cast and counted). At that time, the Bush team abandoned their prior plans and retreated to the seclusion of the governor’s mansion.

Not long after, the networks took the state back from Gore and declared it “too close to call,” offering little in the way of explanation. Still later in the night, the networks gave the state to Bush, and every effort was made to present that as the final, authoritative decision. The earlier call for Gore, purportedly, had been a rush to judgment.

The first network to swing the state to Bush was the Fox News Channel, followed (within four minutes) by all the usual suspects – CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC and MSNBC. The call was made, strangely enough, not based on reports from the Voters News Service, as would be customary, but on the sole discretion of a Fox official.

The fact that such a crucial call was made on the authority of a single news executive – with no supporting documentation – is by itself rather disturbing. Far more disturbing is that the official, John Ellis, is a first cousin of George and Jeb Bush, and he has acknowledged having been in frequent contact with both of the Bush boys on election night.

What we have here then is a presidential election that hinged on a state controlled by a member of the Bush clan, with that state being declared for candidate Bush by yet another member of the Bush clan (who had been hired by Fox just a month before the election). The media immediately fell in line behind this scam, prompting Gore to nearly offer a public concession, wrapping things up before anyone realized what the hell had happened.

It’s almost too obvious a scandal to even be believed. Is the Bush family really so arrogant as to believe that they can get away with literally anything? Can they in fact get away with it? Are Americans so thoroughly conditioned to accepting their media-supplied points of view that they will allow this to stand?

The corruption evident in Volusia County alone is enough to warrant not just a recount, but a re-vote and a thorough investigation. At one point on the night of the election, Gore was leading Bush by 21,000 votes in the county. Within a half an hour, Gore’s tally had dropped by 16,000 votes, while candidate David McReynolds had somehow picked up 10,000 of his own. In the final tally, McReynolds – a Socialist Party candidate – was credited with a grand total of just nine votes.

This discrepancy has yet to be explained. Other irregularities throughout the county were explained away as harmless error and simple misunderstanding. For example, one election worker left the ballot collection area carrying two uninspected bags, prompting a call to the sheriff. The Washington Post explained though that the worker was “merely taking home dirty laundry.” Say what? For what possible reason would a worker be lugging two bags of dirty laundry around a ballot collection area?

Excuse my frankness here, but reading news accounts such as this should really piss you off. Implicit in such coverage is the message that the media thinks you are stupid – a real fucking idiot. So stupid and gullible, in fact, that you’ll go along with wrapping-up this sham election, sweeping all the ugliness under the rug, and propping up George Bush as an illegitimate president.

At any rate, Volusia County experienced other irregularities as well. Six precincts were unable to transfer their results due to the proverbial computer glitch; the county’s returns were not received until 3 A.M., leaving a considerable amount of time during which the ballots could have been altered in any number of ways.

On Wednesday, as a recount was underway, a poll worker dropped off a bag of ballots that had allegedly spent the night in his car. Two days later, three more ballot bags were found in a vault, one with a broken seal, one without a seal, and the third lying open with ballots spilling out. All of this nonsense, we are supposed to believe, is a normal part of any election.

Put any election under such scrutiny, the media mantra goes, and you will find such irregularities. This is absolute nonsense. These were not random, motiveless mistakes that were made; this was a concerted effort to disenfranchise targeted sectors of the population.

As the Palm Beach Post reported, almost half of the disqualified ballots in Palm Beach County came from predominately black and elderly precincts. Throughout the county, seven percent of ballots were thrown out. In precincts where most residents are over age 65, the figure rose to ten percent, and in black precincts, sixteen percent – one in six ballots – were disqualified.

Similarly, the Miami Herald has reported that the same pattern was followed in Miami-Dade County. Countywide, the percentage of voided ballots was 2.7 percent. In some two dozen black precincts, however, the rate was from eight to eleven percent. In the precinct with the highest rate of ‘double punching’ (10.98%), fully 99 percent of the non-disqualified votes went to Gore.

Duval County followed the same pattern. Salon, an on-line magazine, reported that nearly half of the 27,000 disqualified ballots in that county came from just four of its fourteen districts. Those districts’ residents are, oddly enough, primarily black and almost all are Democrats.

The propagandists would have you believe that such irregularities are due to the fact that blacks and the elderly are too stupid (yuck, yuck) to understand the ballots, and have therefore essentially forfeited their right to vote. The truth though is that the elderly appear to have been deliberately targeted with deceptive ballots, so that they could then be publicly ridiculed.

And according to The Times (UK), as many as 17,000 ballots given primarily to black voters had already been marked for a rival candidate, automatically disqualifying them when another candidate was selected. In light of the sheer volume of irregularities, and of the tens of thousands of voters who were affected, it is patently absurd to write the Florida vote off as ‘business as usual.’

A few irregularities would be understandable, but the reports trickling out from Florida indicate wholesale corruption: ballot boxes going missing, ballot boxes reappearing (which may or may not be the boxes that went missing, and may or may not still contain the original contents), illegal poll closings, deceptively designed ballots, unannounced poll relocations, voter intimidation by the police, unexplained removal of names from voter registration lists, and widespread reports of ballot tampering.

Exactly how many voting ‘improprieties’ need to be reported, and how many members of the Bush family need to be directly implicated, before the word ‘fraud’ enters the media’s lexicon? To understand just how thoroughly corrupt and co-opted the media is, a story from the New York Daily News that ran just before the election is instructive.

Revealed there is the strategy that was being prepared by the Bush team to employ in the event that Bush had taken the popular vote but lost the Electoral College vote – the opposite of the current alleged outcome. The team had prepared ‘talking points’ on the unfairness of the Electoral College system and planned a massive media assault, fueled by right-wing talk radio demagogues.

The idea was to spark a popular revolt against the College as an institution that was thwarting the free will of the people. The team had intended to enlist Democrats to join in the bipartisan propaganda campaign. Strangely enough, with Bush now the presumed winner, neither political party – nor the media – seems to really give a shit about the will of the people. Strange how that works.