I give you now Part II of Peggy Noonan's masterful essay on Vote Scams:
Reports begin to filter out. The Democratic army of lawyers and operatives marches into the counting room armed with a five-page memo from a Democratic lawyer, instructing them on how to disfranchise military voters. The lawyers and operatives unspool reams of computer printouts bearing the names and party affiliation of military voters. Those who are Republicans are subject to particular and seemingly relentless scrutiny. Right down to signatures on ballots being compared with signatures on registration cards. A ballot bearing a domestic postmark because a soldier had voted, sent his ballot home to his parents and asked them to mail it in on time, is thrown out. A ballot that comes with a note from an officer explaining his ship was not able to postmark his ballot, but that he had voted on time--and indeed it had arrived in time--is thrown out, because it has no postmark.
The Democratic operatives are ruthless, focused. As one witness says, "They had a clear agenda."
Received late Wednesday, an e-mail forwarded from a Republican who witnessed the counting of the Brevard County overseas absentee ballots.
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It is 11:30 PM (Tuesday) and I have just returned from the count of absentee ballots, that started at 4PM. Gore had five attorneys there, the sole objective was to disenfranchise the military absentee voter. . . . They challenged each and every vote. Their sole intent was to disqualify each and every absentee voter. They constantly challenged military votes that were clearly legitimate, but they were able to disqualify them on a technicality. I have never been so frustrated in all my life as I was to see these people fight to prevent our active duty Military from voting. They succeeded in a number of cases denying the vote to these fine Men and Women.
This was a deliberate all out assault on the Armed Forces solely to sustain the Draft Dodger and his flunky. These people must have a hard time looking at themselves in a mirror. . . . They denied a number of votes postmarked Queens NY, ballots that were clearly ordered from overseas, clearly returned from overseas, and verified by the Post Office that DOD uses the Queens post office to handle overseas mail, were denied because it didn't say APO, They denied military votes postmarked out of Jacksonville, Knowing full well it came from ships at sea and was flown into Jacksonville . . . .
This is what you can expect from a Gore administration a further trampling on the Military and more trampling on your rights. . . . The attorneys there treated it all as a joke, and when my wife protested their actions she was told she didn't understand.
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Television both reports the story of what is happening in the vote-counting rooms and doesn't report it. There are comic pieces and sidebars: "Amazing as it seems, Bernie, there's actually a charge that one of the Democratic counters has eaten a chad!"
But 16 days into the drama there has not been a single serious, extended and deeply reported piece on network television investigating the charges comprehensively. No "60 Minutes," no "Dateline," no "20/20." No extended look at charges of vote tampering, no first-person interviews with eyewitnesses who saw the Democratic operatives go after and throw out the military ballots.
Television does, however, report "extraordinary anger among Republicans." Ed Rollins says "partisan Republicans" are very angry about this. Bill Schneider on CNN says he's never seen Republicans in Washington "so angry." They muse about "the big question": Will these Republicans ever accept the legitimacy of a Mr. Gore if he becomes president?
Oddly enough Republicans do not think that's the big question.
Can the Democrats steal this election is the question.
Why is mainstream television (not the talk shows, not Sean and Alan, not "Crossfire," but the mainstream news shows) missing this story, underreporting it?
It would be taking sides.
It would be partisan.
It would be extreme.
But there is more. We have all noticed the ideological evolution of media in our time. Television is liberal, establishment-oriented, and does what it does: It entertains. Shut out of television and eager for news, conservatives have turned in the past 20 years to radio. And so now radio is conservative, and full of uproar. The Internet too is conservative, and full of information, of samizdat.
But television, the elite media, the great broadsheet newspapers, and the clever people who talk loudly on television--that is, the powers that be, the forces that are--day by day appear through action and inaction, through an inability to see and a refusal to see, to be (a) allowing the stealing of an election in Florida, and (b) subtly taking out the critics of this hijacking.
What are we to do?
In 1939, during parliamentary debate on the coming war in Europe, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain finished another of his hopeful, frightened speeches about making peace with Hitler. The Labour member of Parliament Arthur Greenwood rose to speak in opposition. As he did, the voice of a Tory parliamentarian pierced the chamber. "Speak for England, Arthur!" he called. At that the chamber exploded, and Chamberlain realized that further appeasement was intolerable.
Tomorrow: Conclusion
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Thought for the Day:
"Of all the tyrannies of human kind The worst is that which persecutes the mind."
(John Dryden)