DECENT PEOPLE ARE NOT RACISTS OR RELIGIOUS BIGOTS
FASCISTS WANT CITIZENS WITH SHORT MEMORIES.....GORE=PEOPLE, BUSH=LAND
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT+RIGHT TO LIFE=HYPOCRITE........BUSH IS A MAJOR LEAGUE ASHCROFT

"Maybe she'll be able to join us in Florida. If not, she can clean out her room." Bush, On daughter's recovery from an appendectomy.
Gore +540,000 (Popular Vote)- Bush +1 (Scalia)...Gore Won... Documentation...Gore Winning Florida
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"According to the official certified tally, Bush beat Gore by 537 votes in Florida. But Gore gained 120 votes in an unofficial look at Hillsborough County's disputed presidential "undervotes" by the Tampa Tribune. A net total of 97 of the new Gore votes were from dimpled chads. Gore picked up 28 votes from ballots with various types of hanging chads. Bush had a net gain of 5 votes from 89 ballots that were clearly punched through but were not read by the machine. In a Dec. 30 article, the Tampa Tribune included the dimpled chads to come up with the total figure of Gore picking up 120 votes county-wide. A recent recount of ballots in Lake County by the Orlando Sentinel gave Gore an additional 130 votes. Lake uses a computerized optical-scan system, so chad interpretations did not come into play. If you add the 250 additional Gore votes from Lake and Hillsborough to the votes the Florida Supreme Court ruled should have been included in the final count -- 215 additional votes the vice president gained in Palm Beach County that were disallowed by Secretary of State Katherine Harris because they were late; plus 168 votes Gore picked up in the partial recount of heavily Democratic precincts in Miami-Dade, which were also disallowed -- Gore is ahead by 96 votes in Florida....And the vote counting continues." --Anthony York, 1/4/01 (more)

A Bush Watcher recently wrote to me with the rumor that Jesse Helms has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I knew that some weeks ago his office addressed rumors of his illness in a press release, but hadn't heard anything since. The Helms rumor mill must be heating up, because in today's NYT Gail Collins wrote, "Jesse Helms, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, has also been getting a larger-than-usual number of solicitous inquiries about his health. At 79, Mr. Helms is practically a stripling, but he has had cancer, heart surgery and other assorted ailments that force him to travel around the Capitol in a motorized scooter. Still, reports of his demise, collapse or fading away are incorrect." This must be good news for Bush, because he needs every rabid right wing vote he can get in the Senate.

Bush, of course, has an even more personal concern for the health of Republicans in the Senate, looking for Cheny to break any 50-50 tie in the next session. Cheney, however, with a history of heart attacks and having had a heart attack within the past month, must have Bush on pins and needles, since his condition puts the ex-governor a heartbeat away from the presidency. Unable to even contemplate such a circumstance, the Bush inner sanctum kept news of the latest Cheney heart attack away from Bush, making him look like a real dweeb as he assurred the press that Cheney was in tip-top shape when, in reality, at that very moment Cheney was suffering from the after-effects of heart surgery performed earlier that day.

Then, there's Strom Thurmond, whose senate seat would go to a South Carolina democrat if the 98 year-old conservative senator is unable to complete his term. Since Thurmond is said to be in good health, "nervous Nellies might be troubled by the connection between the phrases "failing memory" and "third in line to the presidency." But there's obviously no real danger that Mr. Thurmond would ever have to take charge. That would require a mind- boggling series of utterly improbable coincidences, like the presidential election being decided because a bunch of Jewish senior citizens accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan," suggests Ms. Collins.

Perhaps to offset thoughts about the U.S. Senate without Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, in a Christmas spirit of good will and bi-partisanship so typical of the man, Trent "Thanksa" Lott suggested not long ago that Hillary Clinton could be struck dead by a ligntening bolt before she became a Senator, thereby placing a Republican appointee in her seat. The usual D.C. sources claim that Bill "Big Dog" Clinton didn't taken kindly to such remarks. When Lott apologized, Clinton said "bullshit." Just the other day the Clinton's bought a house down the block from Cheney's vice-presidential digs, so you can bet that he plans to say "bullshit" a lot in the next four years. What this all means for Bush is that he'd better plan to get all his anti-abortion, pro-gun, anti-environment, pro-vouchers, anti-civil rights, and pro-big business bills through the senate while he still has a fighting chance, because it's unlikely that the Senate will be under his thumb for long. --Politex, 1/2/01

Forget his experience and forget his connection to the Bush administration as well as every Republican administration since Warren Harding. It turns out that one of the main reasons Donald Rumsfeld was selected to be Sec. of Defense one more time is that he's the man behind the Bush missile defense plan. "In 1998," reports Friday's New York Times, "Mr. Rumsfeld, the former Republican congressman, former ambassador to NATO and former secretary of defense, oversaw a commission that concluded that "rogue" nations could threaten the United States with ballistic missiles sooner than analysts had predicted. Conservatives who supported a missile shield hailed the findings as refreshingly candid and worrisome. Liberals who supported arms control criticized them as too focused on potential threats and not on the diplomatic and financial obstacles to building a missile shield. Either way, the commission's report...led the Clinton administration to propose its own limited version of a national missile defense. What turned out to be one of the most influential documents in modern American military planning bears Mr. Rumsfeld's name."

Never mind that the Bush missile defense plan is the son of Reagan's failed Star Wars proposal, never mind that $5 billion has been spent this year alone in proving that the proposed system does not work, never mind that going ahead with such a system will pour untold billions down a defense sinkhole and be "politically and diplomatically divisive," never mind that future attacks on the U.S. are more likely to be by biological non-missiles than nuclear missiles. The bottom line is that Bush wants a missile system plan with his name on it. "In his campaign for president, Mr. Bush advocated building a more expansive defensive system than the one President Clinton proposed and, last summer, deferred. He offered little detail, however, except to say he would not rule out defenses based on the ground, as Mr. Clinton proposed, or at sea and in space. Today, Mr. Bush was no more specific, saying only that he would expect Mr. Rumsfeld to work closely with his budget director 'to make sure that the missile defense receives the priority we think it must receive in future Pentagon budgets.' Still, it is clear that Mr. Bush's selection of Mr. Rumsfeld completes a national security team — including the next vice president, Dick Cheney, and the next secretary of state, Gen. Colin L. Powell — that shares the dream of building the sort of shield against nuclear missiles that President Ronald Reagan envisioned. When his selection was announced on Dec. 16, General Powell made the case forcefully, calling a defensive shield 'an essential part' of the nation's security. Mr. Bush himself referred to Mr. Rumsfeld's prominence on the issue of missile defense, citing his work as chairman of the commission, to which Congressional Republicans had appointed him. 'In picking Don Rumsfeld, we'll have a person who is thoughtful and considerate and wise on the subject of missile defense,' Mr. Bush said."

Let's be honest, here. Bush has no previous background on the subject of missile defense and has neither the interest nor the ability to form one at this late date. This is one of those deals that he promised, where he gets others to do the homework and present their findings and opinions in fifteen minutes before he begins to lose focus and is in need of a quick nap or a mid-day break to play with his baseball video games or to go running. Since he's unwilling/unable to read complex summaries of long position papers, what ultimately happens is he goes with his experiences as a failed businessman and a successful politician, rather than someone capable of absorbing and thinking through complex presentations. In short, Bush will go with a missile defense system that has all the earmarks of failure because the people who supported him will make billions and billions from the defense contracts whether the system works or not, and shadow president Dick "Haliburton" Cheney, who has made his fortune from government contracts, will be glad to rubberstamp Bush's decision as being "wise." After all, isn't that why Bush was chosen by the wealthy and the Supreme Court, to get the money out of government and back into the hands of his CEO backers? --Politex, 12/30/00

Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft looks to be the latest GOP pol to catch grief for an ill-conceived visit to Bob Jones University. But shouldn't we cut the next top-cop some slack? After all it's not like he's off giving interviews to crypto-racist, pro-Confederate magazines, right? Well ... ummm ... OK, maybe he is.

In October 1998 Ashcroft gave an interview to the Southern Partisan magazine in which he lashed out at "revisionists" who make malicious attacks on America's founders, such as charging that George Washington was a racist. (The Q & A's introduction praises Ashcroft as a "jealous defender of national sovereignty against the New World Order.") "Your magazine helps set the record straight," said Ashcroft. "You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and [Jefferson] Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."

Setting the record straight? Is Ashcroft talking about the 1984 Southern Partisan article that argued that "Negroes, Asians, and Orientals (is Japan the exception?); Hispanics, Latins, and Eastern Europeans; have no temperament for democracy, never had, and probably never will"? Or did he mean that 1996 Southern Partisan article that cleared up that whole mix-up about slave owners not doing well by slave families? "Slave owners ... did not have a practice of breaking up slave families," the article noted. "If anything they encouraged strong slave families to further the slaves' peace and happiness."If you're not familiar with the finer points of Southern-fried, right-wing, Confederate-flag-waving political culture, the Southern Partisan is the leading publication of the Neo-Confederate movement, a movement which extols the Confederacy, Southern culture, and at least toys with the idea of the South again seceding from the union. Yes, they did once call David Duke "a candidate concerned about 'affirmative' discrimination, welfare prolifigacy [sic], the taxation holocaust ... a Populist spokesperson for a recapturing of the American ideal."

But, hey, they go in for more than just politics. They publish articles on everything from the latest tips on how to re-enact Pickett's Charge to some of the sharper commentary on why Jews "agitate for the radical secularization of our society." Of course, hob-knobbing with Neo-Confederate wing-nuts won't automatically sink Ashcroft's nomination. Trent Lott praised the white-man-Uber-alles organization Council of Conservative Citizens a few years back and he's still Senate Majority Leader. (Lott gave his own interview to the Southern Partisan back in 1984.) But before Ashcroft goes before the confirmation committee and starts quoting the Southern Partisan about how Negroes and Orientals have no temperament for democracy, someone in the Bush brain trust should intervene and tell him, "John, John, we don't talk that way anymore! It's disgraceful! We now say African-Americans and Asians!" --Joshua Micah Marshall

US elections are a frighteningly antiquated, inequitable and undemocratic hodge-podge of rules and regulations designed to keep out the poor and disadvantaged in maximum numbers. More important, the American ideological system -- which came dangerously close to breaking down completely -- once again saved the day, papering over and then removing from awareness the fundamentally jungle-like struggle of all against all that is the underlying reality when it comes to the power and money of the ultimate prize.... What was at stake, as Ralph Nader pointed out in his finally disappointing campaign, was a system of spoils and patronage....The transfer in sheer wealth and prestige should not be underestimated....And Florida's inequities were only Florida's. Had the recounts begun in Iowa, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Maryland, the whole edifice might indeed have crumbled, revealing it to be a very poorly held together paper castle designed, in the final analysis, to keep people from thinking too deeply and too critically. What does it mean, therefore, for one candidate to have won the popular vote, and the other to have won the election as the result of a decision by a nine-member Supreme Court staffed by five right-wing republicans voting in favor of their party, with the other four of them mounting a lusterless defense of principle and equity? That certainly cannot be called democracy....There is also the undemocratic electoral [college] system which is a legacy of oligarchy and slavery. How it has endured for so long is inexplicable. The system was originally designed in the 18th century to protect property and race, so that a popular election might take place, only to be reratified (or not) by a small group of designated electors who would be seen as confirming (or not) the election results. It is this group that Bush gained to his advantage, even though the popular vote (one person-one vote) had gone against him....

The whole [electoral] system functions essentially as a system of control rather than of democratic participation. We shall never know how many abuses took place in the past. Two per cent of the US population owns 80 per cent of the wealth, and to continue maintaining this disproportionality, the majority has either to be kept under control ideologically or kept out of the system, preferably both. No more than about 35-40 per cent of eligible citizens vote, because the remainder senses, correctly, that their vote does not mean what it should. What counts is that wealthy candidates can manipulate both the mechanisms of voting and/or the media (preferably both) and guarantee the absence of change that has kept the US a country of the very rich supported by a middle class that aspires, or believes that it can aspire, to the American "dream." And it is the survival of this dream with its underlying belief in the need to perpetuate the system that has kept this country so extraordinarily anachronistic by comparison with other industrial democracies. No wonder then that the US has effectively dismantled most of the attributes of the welfare state (absence of health insurance, social security and labor unions under constant attack, badly funded educational system, unceasing complaints about "government spending" on welfare even as the defense budget has exceeded $350 billion, the largest ever in history, extraordinarily punitive prison and police systems). The market rules over everything without regard for the justice and security to which each citizen should be entitled.

I do not want to be misunderstood as saying that everyone in the US is brainwashed. Far from it. What I do want to point out is that a) the system favors the rich and powerful (one of the reasons why Bush won was that he spent far more money than anyone), and in effect works to preserve their ascendancy through a multiplicity of means, including the electoral and ideological systems, at the same time that the whole world is filled with the rhetoric of American democracy and freedom, most of it misleadingly propagandistic; and b) that in reality there is a constant struggle in America which the disadvantaged, including women, racial minorities, and underpaid workers like teachers and nurses, try to wage against the system, with varying degrees of success, but which at present is mostly a discouraging struggle as the [manipulatiors] of the "free" market undermine labor in favor of the largest employers who are coddled by the government through favorable tax laws, loopholes in social security payments, and unfair labor practices.

To me, the ideological system is the most interesting case of all. Not having come to this country until most of my secondary schooling was over I was first struck and have continued to be fascinated by how the powerful presence of violence and conflict in this society is routinely masked and covered up with a more overwhelming rhetoric and unending stream of pacifying thought, stressing the country's unity, the perfection in it of democratic practice and theory, the animating and always benign influence of the Constitution (which although a secular document reflecting the wealthy, white, slaveholding, Anglophilic men who wrote it, is treated with the reverence accorded to scripture by any good fundamentalist anywhere), the completed fulfillment of public idealism, and the utter benignity of everything about America, always the most exceptional country that ever existed. I suspect that all this is ingrained in school children, so that by the age of 12 or 13 -- barring the birth of a critical sense in the individual -- most mature Americans tend to believe all this, or at least have little opportunity in the public domain to voice different sentiments. Certainly it is absolutely true that in the mainstream, discourse is heavily policed: alternative or radical or dissenting voices are either kept out completely or sent to the margins where they have no chance at all of gaining acceptance. So it was with the elections during the past month. No sooner did the Supreme Court make its scandalous decision than the commentators began to put the spin out that American democracy has been restored, national unity established, and so on and on ad nauseam. As if the flaws in the system were forgettable accidents, and therefore not worth dwelling on.

And this brings me to my final point, which is the contempt for history and for rational understanding that underlies the ideological chorus in everyone of its individual manifestations. The subtle question is whether the willing manufacture of consent is worse or better than censorship by coercion. Back of the purification of reality that ideological consent requires is the idea that knowledge of history, the critical history that articulates the whole truth and violence of American politics, is to be opposed at all costs as basically disrupting what Foucault and others have called governability. The moment a large number [of citizens question the] whole thing, a red light goes on in the boardrooms of America where the real decisions are made. Remember that CNN, Time Warner, Disney, NBC, Sky News and the rest are part of the same ideological system, serve the same clientele, and are owned by the same relatively tiny group of people whose interest is to keep things as they are. Memory is an inhibition, a possible threat to their hegemony, just as it is very dangerous for a critic to keep making connections between supposedly un- or non-political institutions like the Supreme Court and the Constitution, and on the other hand, base commercial interests. --Edward Said, 12/26/00

by Jerry Politex

I drove my silver Audi down Mesa Drive, the spine of Cat Mountain, hung a left at the cat's tail, drove quickly up the hilly, winding 2222 in low gear, took a right onto Balcones Drive, and came to a stop in the rear parking lot of Che Zee.

Another sunny, warm early spring day in Northwest Austin, Texas. The lunch crowd was pretty much thinned out by now, so I had choices of parking spaces. I got out of the car, the turbines winding down, and stood by the rear entrance to the restaurant, a pretty-good place for not very expensive Southwestern food. I didn't have long to wait.

He came into the parking lot in an old, rattletrap Nissan pickup. Paint worn off in places, rusty, dusty, squeaky. I recognized him from the description the moment he got out. Looked to be in his fifties. Grizzled. Kind of rusty, dusty, and squeaky. A stringbean of a guy with pale white skin, reddish hair, which was short but unkempt. He was wearing a black polo shirt with the tail out. Denim shorts that had shrunk to a tight fit over his bony hips, short enough for the front pockets to stick out of the frayed cuffs. A pair of old, once-white but now gray, paint-spattered tennis sneakers. Austin casual for a yuppie restaurant, ten minutes from the glass buildings of the city's burgeoning silicon gulch , a world of high tech hopes in buildings springing up like overnight mushrooms.

"Name's Wayne," he said with a crooked, good-natured smile, coming across the parking lot with his arm outstreatched like a spear, eager to shake my hand. "Recognized you right away, Politex. Good description."

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