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Stemfraude Verkiezingen VS 2000 - deel 2

Achteruitgang is Bush’ geheime agenda:
Het is bekend dat na de verkiezing van een Republikeinse president de economie een klap krijgt (iets wat al wordt bewaarheid nog voor Bush is beëdigd).

Bush is vóór belastingverlaging voor de meest rijken, terwijl daar maar relatief weinig van zijn in de VS.

Hij doodt achterelkaar mensen, terwijl steeds vaker bekend wordt dat doodstraf-gevangenen vastzitten voor dingen die ze niet hebben gedaan.

Hij kan zelf waarschijnlijk zijn schoenen nog niet eens strikken, dus je moet maar afwachten wie hij gaat aanstellen om zijn werk te doen, maar je kan op je klompen aanvoelen dat het effect zal zijn dat pa Bush weer terugkeert in het Oval Office, inclusief al diens afgestofte strijdmakkers; en de Reagan-Bush-jaren zijn een ramp geweest voor een ieder die zich geen butler kon veroorloven.

Vooruitgang associeer je met leven, met de lente of zoiets. Bush niet. Bush koos op Yale voor het geheime genootschap Skull & Bones, een club die vooruitgang tot enige doel heeft, maar dan alleen aan de leden, het voert het piratenembleem in het vaandel en omlijst alle rituelen met dood en verderf.

Zo kun je nog wel een tijdje doorgaan. Ik weet niet wat Freud hierover heeft te zeggen, maar op mij komt Bush over als een totaal gefrustreerde nitwit die deze verkiezingsgrap uithaalt om wat liefde van zijn vader te krijgen. Iets wat hij nooit zal krijgen, noch liefde van zijn vrouw, die zó lijkt te zijn teruggelopen van een blijf-van-mijn-lijf-huis; ze kon geen weerstand bieden aan haar masochistische gevoelens. Niets, maar dan ook niets, wijst erop dat Bush een stap vooruit wil doen. Alles wijst op het tegendeel.

En als je denkt dat het allemaal niet erger kon... Big hair en schoudervullingen. De jaren tachtig grijpen dankzij Bush hun kans niet alleen in de regering, maar ook in de mode.
 
 

Voor iedereen die niet wil naar de NY Times voor het hele artikel, hieronder nog een aantal losse citaten uit het artikel Resisting the Recount, zie deel 1 van deze email.

'From the morning after the election, Jeb Bush took an intense and passionate interest in the battle to make his brother president, according to interviews with several state and Republican officials, notwithstanding his effort to strike a low public profile. He offered detailed guidance to his brother's lawyers on how to navigate the political thicket that was South Florida, providing information and insight about local officials who could determine his brother's political future.

The state Republican Party, which is run by Al Cardenas, a lawyer who has been a close ally of Jeb Bush's for 22 years, turned overnight into a full-fledged operative arm of the Bush effort. It turned over all three floors of its red-brick headquarters to Mr. Bush's lawyers and strategists, led by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, and Benjamin L. Ginsberg, the general counsel for the Bush campaign.

Thirty state party employees who were to have been laid off after Election Day were put at the round-the- clock service of the Bush campaign, doing everything from legal research to fetching food and laundry for Mr. Bush's team.

In at least 42 counties, Republican lawyers with ties to the state party were pressed into service, Mr. Cardenas said. In an orchestrated daily campaign, state legislators and local elected officials called radio stations, using airwaves to denounce any hint of a victory by the Gore forces and to broadcast the party "talking points" that were sent several times a day by e-mail. Republican workers in the state's 67 counties, many of whom viewed this as a personal test of Jeb Bush, moved into the counties that were at the fulcrum of the dispute, faxing and e-mailing daily updates about what was taking place on the ground to the presidential campaign headquarters in Austin.

"As a local chairman, my ability to call on 40, 50, 60 volunteers in a short period of time, and to have them down there quick to help out, was quite an asset," said Paul Beding haus, the Florida Republican Party treasurer and the Pinellas County chairman. "The Democrats couldn't match that."

In Tallahassee, Katherine Harris, the secretary of state who served both as the state's chief elections officer and the co-chairwoman of Mr. Bush's campaign, hired a battery of outside lawyers to defend her rulings on what, if any, recounts would be permitted — lawyers paid with taxpayers' money.

"We were fighting for our lives, and we were fighting for a righteous cause," said Marjorie Kincaid, the Republican chairwoman in Hillsborough County.

Mr. Baker and his aides moved into the state party headquarters, which is named after the first president named Bush, and seized on the goal that would govern their actions in the courts and the political arena: To block a recount. The overriding concern, one senior Bush aide said, was that any tally putting Mr. Gore even fleetingly in the lead, especially since the vice president was carrying the popular vote nationwide, would be politically devastating for Mr. Bush.

And they swiftly decided to aggressively present to the nation and, not incidentally, to federal and state judges who were watching the counts on television, an image of Florida in chaos. They did that not only by alerting reporters to genuine episodes of discord, but also by organizing their own demonstrations, then complaining about the chaos that resulted. These images underscored Mr. Baker's warnings, in his televised appearances, that the nation was growing alarmed at the spectacle in Florida.

Republican "observers" were dispatched in teams to disputed counties, told to aggressively monitor the counts and to steer the news media to episodes where there was evidence of disagreement. Party officials directed this effort with two daily conference calls, at 7 a.m. and 10 p.m.

The Bush campaign arranged three-hour election law seminars in Tampa, to instruct Florida Republicans and others who came from out of state on the intricacies of the state's election law and open meetings law, including detailed instructions on how to challenge a ballot.

State Republicans handed out disposable cameras to document episodes of questionable vote counting, and even "evidence bags" to gather disputed chads. At times, those props served to encourage a carnival atmosphere.

Over the 36 days it took to settle the Florida election, Ms. Harris made a series of crucial decisions, and each one, without exception, helped Mr. Bush and hurt Mr. Gore. She told county canvassing boards they lacked the discretion to conduct manual recounts — recounts Mr. Gore desperately wanted. She enforced strict counting deadlines, just as Mr. Bush wanted, and then, contradicting an earlier directive from her office, she advised counties to apply a liberal standard for counting absentee ballots, a move that helped Mr. Bush pick up hundreds of critical votes.

In courtrooms across the state, her formidable team of lawyers relentlessly opposed the Gore campaign at every step. Besides her own legal staff, Mr. Klock's firm placed 29 lawyers and 11 paralegals at Ms. Harris's disposal.

These lawyers, billing Florida's taxpayers $175 an hour, pulled out all the stops, routinely clocking 16-hour days, sometimes working in shifts to crank out briefs 24 hours a day, sometimes sleeping on conference tables. They rented a private plane to fly to Washington for arguments in the United States Supreme Court. So far, Mr. Klock's firm has submitted bills for $627,280 in legal work and $54,986 in expenses.

No matter the courtroom, the Gore legal team, as high-powered as it was with David Boies, the man who took on Microsoft, as its leader, faced a potent tag team of private Bush lawyers and public Harris lawyers. The Harris and Bush lawyers, reinforcing each other's arguments, eating up precious court time, each focused on the single, shared goal of preventing recounts.

"The most harmful thing was the stops and starts caused by the elections decisions from Harris's office," said Mr. Newton, the Gore lawyer. "There were too many days when nobody counted, and in those early days, every little bump hurt. We'd get past one hurdle, then face another, and another, and another. Every time we turned around there was another obstacle."

In many ways, all the forces of mobilization converged in Miami, on the day before Thanksgiving, when the Miami-Dade canvassing board abruptly shut down its manual count, in the very county where Mr. Gore's advisers believed he could win the election. The extent of Republican organization was on display here. Two Republican members of Congress had gone on the radio urging listeners to head for the county government center and join the protest. A recreational vehicle, turned up by Mr. Bush's campaign, was set up outside to provide a stream of fresh T-shirts and placards to the hundreds of demonstrators who chanted and yelled in the very room where the votes were being counted.

The canvassing board headed upstairs to perform the manual recount. Even from there, Mr. Leahy said, he could hear the shouts and the pounding on the doors and windows below. When the board returned downstairs, Mr. Leahy noted that many of the demonstrators were the same Republicans who had been methodically filing ballot protests over the previous two days.'

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