|
Faithful husband, soccer dad,
basset owner, and former cowboy
Return to TboggHomePage
FELLOW TRAITORS
*The Nether-Count*
100 Monkeys Typing
Ain't No Bad Dude
Alicublog
Americablog
American Leftist
Attytood (Will Bunch)
Bad Attitudes
Balloon Juice
Better Inhale Deeply
Bitch Ph.D
Bloggy
Bob Harris
Brilliant At Breakfast
BusyBusyBusy
Byzantium's Shores
Creek Running North
Crooked Timber
Crooks and Liars
Cursor
Daily Kos
Dependable Renegade
David Ehrenstein
Democratic Veteran
Dohiyi Mir
Down With Tyranny
Echidne of the Snakes
Edicts of Nancy
Elayne Riggs
Eschaton (Atrios)
Ezra Klein
Failure Is Impossible
Feministe
Feministing
Firedoglake
First Draft
Freewayblogger
The Garance
The Group News Blog
Guano Island
Hairy Fish Nuts
Hammer of the Blogs
Hullabaloo(Digby)
I Am TRex
If I Ran the Zoo
I'm Not One To Blog
Interesting Times
James Wolcott
Jesus' General
Jon Swift
Juan Cole
King of Zembla
Kung Fu Monkey
Lance Mannion
Lawyers Guns and Money
Lean Left
Liberal Oasis
Main & Central
Majikthise
Making Light (Nielsen Hayden)
Mark Kleiman
Martini Revolution
MaxSpeak
MF Blog
MyDD
Needlenose
The Next Hurrah
Nitpicker
No More Mr. Nice Blog
Norbizness
Norwegianity
Oliver Willis
One Good Move
Orcinus
Pacific Views
Pam's House Blend
Pandagon
Pharyngula
Political Animal(K.Drum)
The Poorman
Progressive Gold
Right Hand Thief
Rising Hegemon
Roger Ailes
Rude Pundit
Rumproast
Sadly, No
Seeing The Forest
Shakesville
Sisyphus Shrugged
Skippy the Bush Kangaroo
Slacktivist
SteveAudio
Suburban Guerilla
TalkLeft
The American Street
The Left Coaster
The Road To Surfdom
The Sideshow
The Talking Dog
The Talent Show
Tom Tomorrow
Tom Watson
Whiskeyfire
UggaBugga
Wampum
Wonkette
World O'Crap
TOSS ME
A BONE
Amazon Wish List
SOURCES
MSNBC
CNN
The Washington Post
Media Matters
The New York Times
The Guardian
Yahoo News
Salon
The Raw Story
Common Dreams
Media Transparency
The Nation
Alternet
Joe Conason
Talking Points Memo
THE VAST WASTELAND
Captain Corndog & Friends
Cheerleaders Gone Spazzy
80% True
Corner of Mediocrity and Banality
Village Idiots Central
Darwin's Waiting Room
News for Mouthbreathers
Mailbox
Your e-mail may be reprinted sans name and e-mail address. Think about how stupid you want to appear.
Blogroll Me!
Site Feed
|
Thursday, October 14, 2004
A mind fogged by alcohol.
Oh, jeebus:
If Drudge has it right, then the Kerry-Edwards campaign is going to do its damnedest to turn our fine nation into a banana republic.
To these guys, winning office is more important than the sanctity of elections. Holding power is more important than the Constitution. Much as I despise at least half of what most Republicans stand for, they don't seem nearly as willing to trash the system they're trying to run. Too many Democrats, especially at the national level, just don't care that our system, our nation is far more important than any single election.
Where the hell was Green during the 2000 election?
In the December 12 ruling by the US Supreme Court handing the election to George Bush, the Court committed the unpardonable sin of being a knowing surrogate for the Republican Party instead of being an impartial arbiter of the law. If you doubt this, try to imagine Al Gore's and George Bush's roles being reversed and ask yourself if you can conceive of Justice Antonin Scalia and his four conservative brethren issuing an emergency order on December 9 stopping the counting of ballots (at a time when Gore's lead had shrunk to 154 votes) on the grounds that if it continued, Gore could suffer "irreparable harm," and then subsequently, on December 12, bequeathing the election to Gore on equal protection grounds. If you can, then I suppose you can also imagine seeing a man jumping away from his own shadow, Frenchmen no longer drinking wine.
From the beginning, Bush desperately sought, as it were, to prevent the opening of the door, the looking into the box--unmistakable signs that he feared the truth. In a nation that prides itself on openness, instead of the Supreme Court doing everything within its power to find a legal way to open the door and box, they did the precise opposite in grasping, stretching and searching mightily for a way, any way at all, to aid their choice for President, Bush, in the suppression of the truth, finally settling, in their judicial coup d'état, on the untenable argument that there was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause--the Court asserting that because of the various standards of determining the voter's intent in the Florida counties, voters were treated unequally, since a vote disqualified in one county (the so-called undervotes, which the voting machines did not pick up) may have been counted in another county, and vice versa. Accordingly, the Court reversed the Florida Supreme Court's order that the undervotes be counted, effectively delivering the presidency to Bush
and
On December 8th, the Florida Supreme Court ordered that "undervoted" punch card ballots — which had registered no vote for President — would be counted by hand. The next day, the Supreme Court, by a vote of 5-4, stayed the Florida Supreme Court's directive, ordering that the recounts be stopped immediately.
For a stay of a lower court's opinion to be granted, the stay must be necessary to avoid "irreparable harm." But no such harm ever threatened to occur here. What would have happened if the recount had gone on, and the Court later held (as it in fact did hold) that the criterion for recounting violated the Equal Protection Clause? The recount simply would have had no legal effect, and Bush would still have become President.
Nevertheless, Justice Scalia concurred in the stay. Where was the "irreparable harm," according to Justice Scalia? It lay in his worry that the results of the recount might "cast[] a cloud upon what [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election." Conversely, suppressing the recounts, he claimed, would help produce "election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires."
Thus, viewing the ballots not as legally binding votes, but simply as an expression of voters' intentions, Justice Scalia accepted the notion that such an expression would harm the perception of a Bush presidency, and that this harm was sufficient to order the recount stopped.
Yet it is a classic free speech principle that speech generally cannot be suppressed due to "expressive" harm alone — that is, due to the harm that occurs when people hear and believe its message. With narrow exceptions, including the familiar "incitement to imminent lawlessness" test, that is the law. Only, again, in this instance, Justice Scalia discarded traditional free speech tenets when the message of the speech at issue (as in the pro-abortion or pro-gay rights cases) was one with which he vociferously disagreed. This time, the message was: "Gore should be President."
The Supreme Court's actions, of course, have not only failed to remove any clouds over the legitimacy of the coming Bush administration, but they have succeeded in marring the legitimacy of the Supreme Court itself. The principle of free expression should not admit of government censorship — even in the name of heterosexuality, opposition to the right of abortion, or a presidency for the man who intends to appoint more people like Justice Antonin Scalia.
and
While Gore said the outcome of the election is still unclear, the vice president repeated a request for a meeting with the Texas governor, his Republican opponent, before the final returns are tabulated, so the two men could "testify to the truth that our country is more important than victory."
Bush made no mention of Gore's offer on Wednesday; he spurned a similar request made by the vice president last week. The Texas governor also would not comment on questions about any plans he might have to appeal the state ruling, referring them to his legal team in Florida led by James Baker.
Green concludes:
Now, I know this is an angry essay. However, I don't mean to imply that all Democrats are evil and all Republicans are sweetness and light. Far from it. But for the first time in 16 years, I'm going to vote Republican straight down the line. If I have to punish a couple of local Democrats I'm fond of, then so be it, but I have to try to get a point across: The national Democratic Party is bad for this country.
I don't say that because of their policies, which I probably agree with more than I do the Republicans. But because their tactics would cause more harm to this country than the Federal Marriage Amendment, the Republican budget deficit, and Congress's corporate tax giveaways, combined.
I'm just one guy; I don't expect my vote to mean much. But the Democrats are willing to treat – in advance - my vote, and all it represents, with feigned contempt. So I can't, in return, treat the Democrats with anything less than genuine contempt.
With an argument as flawed as that, Green deserves nothing less than contempt.
Drunken yuppie twerp.
|
|
