In "We were unprepared for election problems, Ed Hopkins claims to be a Democrat who seems to think that that lends credibility to his claim that "…it is time for the whining to stop," as if the thing we are sounding the alarm about is that the election was stolen from the Democrats.
I could care less about the fact that the Democrats were cheated. They deserve any loss they suffered because of their namby-pamby party-line reaction to the theft. Gore and Loserman were actually complicit in letting this go as politics as usual. That is Mr. Hopkin's party line.
The election was stolen from all the people of all parties. Mr. Hopkins would have us believe this was "…simply a situation that had never happened before and as a result, no one had any idea exactly what to do." That ignores many cases in our history where both the closeness of the vote and fraud influenced the outcome of the election. We didn't call Rutherford B. Hayes "His Fraudulency" for nothing.
What is unprecedented is that no political leader has had the backbone to pursue the fully theft of the election by traitors. The initial confusion and inability to believe that any American could be guilty of such treason may be forgiven. But Hopkin's "head in the sand" pose that invites "a foot in the Butt" should have given way to a determination to get and set things right long before now.
It will never be too late to set things right. Congress has the power to impeach and try, convict and turn out of office all those involved in such thefts, and leave them subject to trial for treason. But that won't happen as long as those responsible for leading us to such a catharsis of our election process continue to pretend, as does Mr. Hopkins, that this is politics as usual which doesn't need changed.
Mr. Hopkins justifies his whitewash by his claim that: "Twelve million votes cast in Florida, with only a five hundred-vote margin and that state the difference in the Electoral College. Who could have anticipated that?"
However, the "five hundred vote margin" was what resulted after at least 40,000 to 64,000 votes were stolen, as he would know if he had read non-partisan investigations of what happened in Florida and Washington in that election. Does Mr. Hopkins think we should have anticipated that the traitors would have stolen many more than they needed? Rather, we should have expected them to steal few more than needed. Each extra vote stolen made it more likely that they would be exposed.
The British Broadcasting Corporation which is as impartial as anyone could want, on Feb. 16 of this year answered our need to know "What really happened in Florida?" in a revealing TV expose by Gregory Palast of the London Observer on its web site listed below.
The irony is that it was the thieves who were the ones unprepared to steal as many votes as they had to because the great turnout of blacks had balanced the thieves' theft of black votes by ethnic cleansing of the voter rolls. We may never have known about the theft except for the fact that initial exit polls showed that the election was nowhere nearly so close as the consequences of those thefts made it appear.
As exit polls made it clearer and clearer as the day wore on that Jeb was going to lose the state for his brother, more and more desperate chances were taken. The dirty partisan political maneuvering of Katherine Harris in giving false instructions to county elections boards alerted people that something extraordinarily wrong was happening.
That seems to be the sort of thing that Mr. Hopkins seems to have approved of when he said, "Was there political maneuvering by the Republicans to influence the final decision in Florida? Duh!" and concluded that "…what else is an election but politics - before, during and after….?" Some of us "naïve patriots" would like an election to be a way of finding out what the people really wanted.
The BBC, investigative reporter PALAST went to "The Biltmore, grandest hotel in Miami": "Democrats are upstairs eating with their richest friends charging $5,000 a plate….Not far away from the millionaires on the balcony a voter had taken hostages at gun point protesting against the election fraud. But here it is back to champagne politics as usual. One Democrat whispered they would have done the same as Katharine Harris if they had the chance."
And no doubt Tammany Hall and Chicago bosses often did. But evil precedence does not make it right now. However, other Democratic operatives at that dinner recognized, that the Republicans had gone too far: "…party chairman, BOB POE, [Florida Democrats] remains bitter: "Jeb Bush, Katharine Harris, Clay Roberts did everything they could to stop every legitimate count of the vote. And that's what did us in."
Mr. Hopkins responds to what he calls such "whining": "…anyone who is naïve enough to think Democrats weren't trying to use whatever political tricks they could, shouldn't tell anyone,…."
But not only do two wrongs not make a right, all wrongs are not equal: dirty politics are not always "dirty tricks". There is a clear line between legitimate "dirty politics" (like Duh?bya wagging the Dog over Iraq and House members wagging their fingers pretending to investigate Clinton's pardons--both to distract public attention from the Pretender Presidents foibles) and "dirty tricks" like Watergate, Iran-Contragate, and setting up Clinton with Lewinsky leading to the Clinton impeachment--in which people broke laws and used the powers of their political positions to serve partisan purposes. That is not politics, that is treason, beyond a line defined by Penal and Civil Codes.
Mr. Hopkins said: "Until there is proof that something illegal took place, let us stop complaining about the politics in Florida. It sounds too much like sour grapes and that the Republicans were better at it than we were."
Hopkins seems uninformed that there is abundant independent evidence that at least 40,000 to 64,000 votes were stolen. Whether that evidence is sufficient for proof should be for a jury to decide. But if Mr. Hopkins thinks that the right wing Attorney General Ashcroft and FBI Director, Louis Freeh, will vigorously investigate and prosecute crimes in which Mr. Bush is implicated up to his red neck, then Hopkins is the one who is very, very, naïve.
If Mr. Hopkins thinks we could get Republican bossed House committees that are now inappropriately investigating Clinton's pardons to investigate the Bushes stealing of the election, he is a babbling Reprobate no matter what he claims.
But the evidence exposed by the U. S. Civil Rights Commission and Commissioner Edley and the BBC remains so overwhelming that it will prove to any level headed, open minded citizen that an investigation is needed where prosecutors could trade reduced sentences to those who did the acts for their testimony against their bosses in the activity.
To bring that evidence to court we first have to get Democratic Representatives elected who will insist on an impeachment process investigation whereby they can investigate the election fraud with the power of prosecutors to subpoena and force people to testify by granting them immunity if necessary to get around their taking the fifth. That can not be done until the Republicans are booted out of control of the House in 2003. Only then will excellent evidence turn into excellent proofs and convictions!
If there had been no evidence of anything other than political tricks as usual that had not passed that line between dirty politics and dirty tricks, I'd say that we should just point out the dirty politics involved and campaign to get rid of politicians who take part in such corrupt practices that may not be punishable by law but should be punished by voters.
But when a Secretary of State informs many County officials falsely as to what they can and can not do in order to stall them until it is too late for them to do what they legally could and should have done, and has lied with full knowledge that she was misinforming public officials in her public capacity in order to keep many votes from not being cast or counted in contravention of the State Constitution and election laws, she has committed a degree of fraud that crossed far over the bar--and when she has done that in collusion with others, that is conspiracy. When that subverts a Constitutional election, it is treason.
Such actions were also fool-hearty since her unplanned, desperate and impulsive acts to win after her planned measures failed to steal the election were more likely to be revealed. As the BBC discovered of the current recount: "They are carefully going through the 179,855 uncounted ballots that Harris did not want tallied. They'll know the winner next month. Sources tell Newsnight that Gore's ahead by 20,000 votes.
But that is in regard to the votes that Harris tried to cover up. That is nothing compared to evidence BBC presented of her prior planned collusion with the Bushes to ethnically cleanse the voting rolls of over 20,000 black Democrats likely to vote en mass for Gore.
There were another up to 20,000 votes for Gore that can't be counted because they were never allowed to be cast. Don't take my word for it. The thrust of the impartial BBC investigation concerned the 22,000 voters fraudulently ethnically cleansed from the voting roles. The BBC clearly revealed the answer to their question of "…whether George W Bush won the election or did brother Jeb steal it for him?"
The BBC discovered that 22,000 mainly black Gore voters were turned away from the polls by errors in "…a very expensive contract between Governor Jeb's division of elections and a private company named DBT that contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican party.
While DBT claims to have only "…accidentally wiped off the voter rolls thousands of Democratic voters Greg Palast of the BBC and The London Observer found damning evidence that suggests that CLAYTON ROBERTS, Florida Director of Elections, was right when he said of DBT: "They do what we contract them to do."
But when BBC began to ask more specific questions Roberts canceled to interview and called the police to get rid of the questioners. Fortunately for the voters, he could not so easily get rid of the questions--and of evidence of the real answers. Those are discussed on my web site along with a verbatim copy of the BBC program which includes damning testimony from a DBT employee.
There I also reveal the folly of Mr. Hopkins' mistaken "common sense" claim that the Florida recounts were illegal because they violated the 14th amendment. Due to space required to show the falsity of Mr. Hopkins' claims and the nature and source of the evidence against Jeb & Co., you will have to go to my web site or the BBC for that.
If still posted, you may find the original BBC transcript at:
http://newssearch.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/events/newsnight/newsid_248000/248099.stml .
A copy of the text of BBC's expose is on: http://geocities.datacellar.net/chiefbullmoose .
If you can get neither, I'll send you a free copy upon request to: edromar@hotmail.com