For half the electorate, "he is linked to God. He is God´s ram.

i love the opening part of ´democratic media bias´...

Candidates silent on U.S. invasions

LINDA MCQUAIG

There was plenty of outrage south of the border last week over the news that the British newspaper, the Guardian, had organized a letter-writing campaign to influence undecided American voters. "How dare they?" huffed CNN anchor Lou Dobbs.

The denunciations of "outside interference" were so fierce one could have easily been left with the impression that Americans are scrupulous themselves about never interfering in the affairs of other nations.

Of course, we know this isn´t the case. So it was hard not to see a double standard at work. Apparently, invading another country is okay, but writing letters to voters in another country is really crossing the line.

Two years ago, America outed itself as a full-fledged military empire, when George W. Bush declared Washington´s right to launch pre-emptive wars wherever or whenever it deems necessary.

This declaration of the ultimate right to intervene in the affairs of other countries is perhaps the single most alarming policy of the Bush administration. And it has opened up a deep divide between America and millions of people around the world who find the doctrine offensive.

Yet, astonishingly, the Bush administration´s assertion of Washington´s right to launch wars is not even being debated in the current presidential election campaign.

If anything, the opposite is happening. Instead of Bush being on the defensive for effectively declaring America an empire, John Kerry has been on the defensive over whether he is sufficiently pro-empire.

Ever since Kerry suggested in the first debate that the U.S. invasion of Iraq didn´t "pass the global test," Bush has relished the line, bringing it up repeatedly in an effort to paint Kerry as soft on empire.

My guess is that Kerry, who took a principled stand against the Vietnam War, would behave less aggressively in the world than Bush.

But, in this campaign, Kerry seems keen to present himself as being just as militaristic as the next guy. He´s responded to Bush by insisting he´d never allow America´s right to wage war to be subject to the approval of other countries, in other words to be bound by the same rules that bind other nations.

Of course, abiding by international law doesn´t leave a country unable to defend itself.

The U.N. Charter specifies that every country has the right to act in self-defence if attacked. But any other use of force is illegal, unless the Security Council determines it to be in the collective interest of international peace and security.

When Washington realized it couldn´t win Security Council approval for its plan to invade Iraq, it withdrew its request and went to war without U.N. approval. In other words, it went to war illegally — a fact noted last month by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a BBC interview.

Tellingly, Annan´s statement caused barely a ripple in the U.S. presidential race. Although the Iraq war is front and centre in the campaign, the debate is confined to questions like which candidate has a better strategy for winning or whether Americans would be safer if the U.S. had concentrated, instead, on pursuing Osama bin Laden.

These are interesting questions, but they don´t address Annan´s larger point, one that simply doesn´t register in the U.S., that Washington has no right to invade another country. In other words, this isn´t just about the safety of Americans. It´s about the safety of other people, too.

Michael Mandel, a law professor at York University´s Osgoode Hall, notes that the Nuremberg Tribunal following World War II ruled that starting a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, because it´s the crime from which all the other war-related crimes flow.

Mandel argues that the invasion of Iraq amounts to the supreme international crime.

The Bush administration has tried to claim the high moral ground, stressing that it puts great effort into avoiding civilian casualties in Iraq.

This is nonsense. If it is engaged in a war of aggression, any casualties it creates — deliberate or accidental — are a violation of international law, not to mention a gross injustice. And countless Iraqis have been killed by U.S. forces in Iraq.

Washington presents its ongoing attacks on insurgents as self-defensive, but Mandel insists that an aggressor has no right to self-defence. "If you break into someone´s house and hold them at gunpoint and they try to kill you but you kill them first, they´re guilty of nothing and you´re guilty of murder."

But the typical American voter would have little sense of any of this — unless, perhaps, he or she received a letter from a newspaper reader in Britain who had the barefaced audacity to try to intervene in the affairs of another country.

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Like his venture into Oregon and having the you are not for me crowd shot with pepper bullets. Like the girl who died in Boston? Like the children and old grandmas tasered.

The shrub is insane and paranoid. Too much power for a crazy loon.

Fusing God and country

HAROON SIDDIQUI

By most counts, George W. Bush´s presidency has been a disaster, at home and abroad. Yet he continues to command the support of nearly 50 per cent of the electorate. Why?

It is easier to answer the flip side of the question: Given the monumental mistakes made by this incumbent, why has Senator John Kerry failed to sew up this election, as he should have long ago?

Practising risk-averse politics, Kerry has failed to rise to this historic moment to provide the leadership many Americans have been desperately seeking.

Back to Bush.

Here are some of the explanations given for the president´s remarkable success at keeping his base: In America´s highly partisan and increasingly polarized politics, Democrats and Republicans rarely switch loyalties. In times of trouble, people stand by the commander-in-chief. No wartime president has lost an election. Hence the Bush drumbeat of "the W-A-R on terror." His sloganeering — portrayed as an over-arching vision: that "freedom is on the march" in the world under American tutelage — transcends the mess he has made in Iraq and elsewhere. In post-9/11 primordial America, fear-mongering works. Voters want assurances that Kerry can kill the terrorists.

"Yes, I can — that´s what I did in Vietnam," he keeps saying.

But many voters count on the gun-slinging Bush to pull the trigger.

All of the above, however, still does not fully explain why half the voters would ignore record job losses, record health insurance losses, record deficit and debt, and a growing gap between rich and poor.

That they are willing to set aside their self-interest suggests that something big is at work.

It is Iraq.

In fact, it´s something more than Iraq. It is the fact that this unmitigated disaster, which should be Bush´s weakest point, is his strongest.

To get at the dichotomy, I spoke to two prominent Canadian academics familiar with America.

Professor Charles Taylor of McGill University, our foremost philosopher, has often taught south of the border.

Connie Rooke, professor of English, former president of the University of Winnipeg and founder of the Eden Mills Writers´ Festival near Guelph, was born in New York in what she describes as "a right-wing robber baron Republican family."

Taylor has coined a new phrase: Great Power Autism.

America has a learning and behaviour disorder.

It cannot comprehend the complicated world. It cannot make sense of what non-Americans are saying. It has a skewed view of them.

"Those who do not agree with America are all just bad guys," said Taylor.

"Americans are living in their bubble," to the point that their "lack of understanding of the world is frightening."

That is one reason Bush hasn´t paid the price at home for the damage he has done abroad, even to American interests.

In fact, Taylor said, Bush has turned his worldwide unpopularity into a badge of honour.

He has done so by fusing patriotism and religion, which does not bother Americans the way it would Canadians.

Many Americans take the dividing line between state and church to mean only that the state should not "line up with any particular denomination."

But having evolved into a multi-faith society, America is "caught between and betwixt a totally secular state, like France, or being a confessional state."

Many Americans retain "the vague theocratic notion that there´s something Providential about America. America is there to do God´s work on Earth."

And Bush is doing it.

For half the electorate, "he is linked to God. He is God´s ram.

"To them, details don´t matter. The mess in Iraq — bad intelligence, not enough troops, Abu Ghraib and every conceivable mistake made — is a minor matter" in the greater mission.

Meanwhile, the other half of the electorate is full of anguish.

And the rest of the world thinks Bush is sounding "more and more ridiculous."

But his supporters think "his heart is in the right place. He is real America."

And Kerry ain´t.

Taylor´s parting thought: "No other Western nation would elect a Bush, or at least re-elect him."

In a separate interview, Rooke expressed similar themes but with different twists.

America´s God-infused patriotism was always under the surface but burst forth after 9/11, she said.

"Americans are trained in patriotism in a way unimaginable in Canada. Faith is not just faith in God, it is faith in America.

"There´s the fundamentalism of religion and there´s the fundamentalism of patriotism.

"To be patriotic is to give unquestioning allegiance: my country, right or wrong."

Even the media are affected, abandoning their role at the very time when it is needed the most. Post-9/11, journalists have been "pusillanimous."

Add the ownership of the media by the conservatives, the rise of the religious right and the neo-conservative political movement, along with the increasing influence of corporate interests, and you end up with a culture tailor-made for Bush.

"Even the poor can be snowballed.

"No matter how high the corporate profits and how poorly the people are doing, those stories are not going to get through as loudly as the jingoism.

"Powerful people have really got their act together."

Americans get such a filtered view that most have little or no idea about the sinking American reputation abroad.

When they do hear it, "it´s easy for them to dismiss critics as bad people who don´t like America."

Americans have been herded into a tribalism that suits the conservative churches, the neo-con ideologues and the military- industrial complex.

Iraq was their dream come true. Dick Cheney´s former employer, Halliburton, was first at the trough.

The dream has turned into a nightmare, but the coalition of "the ignorant and the greedy," as Rooke calls it, endures.

For now.


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AC, 5:46, word up man.

Fearful Florida


Suspicious black voters on guard against repeat of 2000 disenfranchisement Can election be stolen? Troubling allegations fuel America´s sense of foreboding

TIM HARPER

JACKSONVILLE, Fla.—Every morning at 8 o´clock, Stephanie Denmark plops her stool down on East Monroe St. and waits for the daily procession of the suspicious and the defiant.

Denmark is a self-styled election cop, an African American who has waited four years to right the wrongs committed four years ago in Duval County.

"I´m here so our vote won´t be stolen again," she says.

Down at the other end of the block, Pat Taylor, another Democratic worker, has her own sardonic twist on her day´s labours.

"It´s good to be back at the scene of the crime," she says.

Denmark and Taylor are acting as Democratic sentries at the only early-voting site in a county of 500,000 voters, the largest Florida jurisdiction to have but one early-voting site until public pressure opened four more — albeit with truncated hours — beginning yesterday.

Across a nation riven by suspicions that next week´s presidential election will be stolen somehow, by one side or the other, few counties in the state again in the spotlight carry the baggage of this massive northern one, more southern Georgia than the Florida most Canadians see in their mind´s eye.

Here, the march to democracy is tentative at best.

While most of the world was watching Palm Beach County´s tragi-comic struggle with hanging, dimpled and pregnant chads four years ago, Duval County was the home of voter disenfranchisement.

Four years ago, 27,000 ballots were disqualified here after officials declared them to be improperly marked.

Most of the ballots came from heavily black neighbourhoods in Duval, the county with the heaviest proportion of black voters — 26 per cent — in the state.

Denmark and Taylor are urging voters to use paper ballots — rather than the new touch-screen machines available here — so there will be a paper trail in case a recount is demanded.

Most heed their advice.

"If they toyed with our vote the last election, I wouldn´t put it past them to do it again," says John Sturdivant, after casting his ballot. "If it´s on paper, it´s harder for them to hide."

They? Them?

"The Republicans, man," he says. "The Democrats wouldn´t sabotage their own vote."

Corrine Brown, the Democratic congresswoman for the area, says Jacksonville has an abysmal history of democracy, one that predates the 2000 controversy.

"People don´t understand what it´s like when your governor is the brother of the president," she says, referring to Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

"In this county alone, 27,000 votes were disregarded — 27,000. People in this county are still very despondent about what happened to them.

"I think we have the right to use caution and suspicion.

"But I grew up watching the fights and I know that, when you deliver a knockout, you don´t need no judge."

The supervisor of the county election office resigned abruptly last Monday, citing health problems.

His replacement, Republican backer Bill Scheu, immediately agreed to demands from the black clergy that more early-voting sites be opened and has met with ministers daily.

But black leaders in Duval say every concession from GOP officials is like pulling teeth.

"You tell people in Canada that the voting system is better in Iraq or Afghanistan," says James Sampson, pastor of the First New Zion Missionary Baptist Church and an outspoken critic of the county´s voting system.

"We´ve spent millions overseas to ensure foreign votes count, but we haven´t spent half as much here to ensure our votes count. Why should foreign votes count more?"

Fuelled partly by the resentment that still lingers from the 2000 Florida voting fiasco, there are 1.4 million more voters registered here than in four years ago, the Florida secretary of state reported Friday.

While Democrats are flooding early-voting sites to try to ensure their ballots count, Republicans have been urged to mail in absentee ballots. Four days after absentee ballots began arriving Monday, Scheu said 22,750 had already been received.

In 2000, only 33,000 absentee ballots were cast altogether.

It is this huge surge of potential voters in battleground states, including Ohio and Pennsylvania, that is causing apprehension and fuelling paranoia across the country.

In Ohio, the final day of voter registration brought out a flood of humanity, swamping offices and featuring long lines snaking out of offices, with labour organizations in Cleveland reporting 100,000 new sign-ups at the deadline.

On Friday, Republicans in Ohio announced they would place as many as 3,600 operatives at polling places to challenge what they say could be fraudulent voting attempts by Democrats.

Nationally, various interest groups have spent at least $350 million (U.S.) this year to increase the turnout, which could exceed 121 million, up from 105 million four years ago.

There is no certainty that polling places can handle the crush.

All of this has created the impression that the most important players on Nov. 2 will not be George W. Bush or John Kerry, but rather the teams of lawyers both have assembled.

To outsiders, the crazy quilt of voting rules across the United States is difficult to fathom.

In Florida, there are 67 counties and 67 sets of voting rules.

Part of this is the inevitable result of the inherent American resistance to taking orders from Washington or, in the case of Florida, the state government in Tallahassee.

On the streets of Jacksonville, fears of a repeat of 2000 are palpable.

So, too, in nearby Leon County, where the elections office has received reports of people being incorrectly told they can vote early for president by phone. Voters also have told of unknown callers offering to pick up and deliver absentee ballots for them.

The Orlando Sentinel reported Friday that tens of thousands of Florida voters may be illegally registered to vote in two states and at least 1,600 of them may have cast 2000 ballots both here and in Georgia or North Carolina.

The newspaper found 68,000 cases in which voters with the same names and dates of birth were registered in two states.

There have been equally troubling allegations in other parts of the country.

Sproul and Associates, an Arizona-based company owned by the former head of Arizona´s Republican party and the state´s Christian Coalition branch, is under investigation in Oregon and Nevada over claims that canvassers hired by Sproul were instructed to register only Republicans and shred registration forms completed by Democrats.

The Oregon secretary of state department is looking into complaints. Sproul has denied any wrongdoing.

In Ohio, the Democratic party and a coalition of labour and voters´ rights group yesterday lost its federal appeals court challenge to the Republican secretary of state´s ruling that provisional ballots are invalid if cast in the wrong precinct.

In Michigan, a federal judge said such ballots must be counted if cast by voters at the wrong precinct but in the right city, township or village.

In Missouri and Colorado, judges have ruled that provisional votes cast in the wrong place don´t have to be counted.

Provisional ballots are not counted until after the election. They are set aside and inspected by Democratic and Republican election board employees to establish their validity.

Ralph Nader is still in the courts to try to get his name on the ballot in some states, fighting off Democratic challenges.

Republicans have countered that the Democratic challenges to Nader are really meant to delay ballots being sent overseas, where soldiers in Iraq are expected to clearly back Bush.

In New Jersey and Florida´s Broward County, there are still challenges in the courts arguing that touch-screen voting machines are unreliable.

And the sleeper suit — which could really be the election-stopper this year — is in Colorado, where a ballot initiative aims to end the state´s system of giving all its Electoral College votes to the winner and divide them based on popular vote.

A Colorado resident has sued to stop the state ballot measure, arguing that applying it to this election would be unfair because people would be voting without knowing whether the winner-take-all system still applies.

With at least 27 lawsuits charging voter suppression, illegal edicts, fraud or improper preparation or equipment currently before U.S. courts, the Bush-Cheney campaign says Democrats are purposely sowing confusion by filing frivolous suits and trying to deflect from the fact that their man is going to lose.

"We now see Democratic efforts and groups associated with the Democrats `forum shopping,´ looking for other courts, bringing these lawsuits in an effort to try and paralyze the system," said Bush campaign chair Marc Racicot.

"Our belief is that there is a certain sense of desperation associated with the Democrats´ campaign."

Bush-Cheney general counsel Tom Josefiak sparked controversy this month when he sent out an e-mail to party supporters soliciting funds, entitled: "Hope for the Best, Prepare for the Recount."

Wrote Josefiak: "In 2000, I was in Florida for the recount and remember the attacks we had to fend off in order to protect the result of a fair election from the efforts to steal it."

That view is shared even among some African American voters casting early ballots in Jacksonville.

"This whole thing about the election being stolen by the Republicans is sour grapes," says Roger Henderson, a local broadcaster. "It´s just Democrats making a lot of noise.

"It´s not disenfranchisement. It is a lust for power by the Democrats."

But the problems appear to be systemic.

In a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll released last week, 52 per cent of black respondents said it is very or somewhat likely that they will be disenfranchised, compared with 20 per cent of whites who held similar opinions.

"We go around preaching democracy around the world, but we don´t have it here," commented Larry Caine, an African American from Virginia.

More than 25,000 lawyers, international election monitors and advocacy groups will be scrutinizing voting in key states on Nov. 2.

At a John Edwards rally here on Friday night, Democratic Senator Bill Nelson assured those in attendance that Kerry has assembled a legal team "without par" to investigate voter irregularities.

"We are talking about the very fundamentals of democracy," he said. "Every legal registered voter has the right to vote and have it counted as they intended it."



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Yep, sooner or later, there is going to be another civil war. This government is shit. Bunch of criminals.