Something to Celebrate If You're a Fascist

It's been ten years since the United States Supreme Court decided to jettison the will of the American people and appoint George W. Bush as president of the United States.  It was the worst decision in the history of the United States, even worse than Dred Scott or Plessy v. Ferguson.  It's worse because the decision basically said it was okay for a supposed neutral body, a court, to decide elections.

There was nothing Al Gore could do to reverse the decision. Remember, he, like former president Bill Clinton, believed in the American system of elections and knew he had little recourse without the other side inciting violence.  The Bush flaks were prepared to overthrow Gore if it came to that. But ever since Bill Clinton had won the presidency in 1992, there had been a movement afoot to destroy the underpinnings of democracy for the purpose of installing an aristocracy in the United States.  The whole sham Clinton scandals, including the Lewinsky circus, were designed to destabilize his presidency so that he could get little accomplished and help the GOP in gaining more seats in Congress.

Now the GOP has gotten much more sophisticated with each election.  Now they've, or even more accurately, the neoliberals, basically infiltrated the Democratic Party to the point of putting one of their own, Barack Obama, so any shenanigans like Bush v. Gore can now be avoided.  He's a puppet doomed to fail on purpose, and the GOP will like clockwork get back into the White House and probably have both houses in Congress by 2013.

WSWS remembers this shameful anniversary:

The first recount of voting machines, required by Florida law, cut Bush’s supposed margin from 1,725 to 327 votes, but there were tens of thousands of ballots still uncounted, concentrated in four major metropolitan counties—Miami-Dade, Broward, Volusia and Palm Beach—where there was a substantial Democratic majority. Local officials began hand recounts in each of these areas.

The Republican-controlled state government stepped in to block this vote counting. Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, co-chairman of the Bush campaign in Florida and a Bush elector, first ordered the counting stopped. When reversed in court, she said she would not extend the November 14 deadline for reporting final totals, even though her own actions, in initially halting the count, made it impossible for three of the four counties to finish their recounts in time.

This arrogant opposition to demands that all votes be counted typified the stand of the Bush camp from the beginning. It was combined with misinformation and lies. The chief of the Bush recount team, former secretary of state James Baker, declared that machine counts were more reliable than hand counts, although hand counts are accepted as the highest standard in most states, and Bush had signed a Texas state law to that effect.