Two Stolen Elections=One Damaged Republic

By now it should be painfully obvious to anyone with half a brain (Attn: viewers of Fox and Friends) that the most criminal administration in the history of human folly is only in power because they blatantly stole two elections and that the people in our country who have suffered the most from the despicable policies of the corrupt regime of George W. Bush were the main pawns in their twisted little game.

In the state of Florida during the campaign of 2000, Jeb Bush and everyone's favorite political call girl, Katherine Harris, hired an out-of-state firm that was able to come in and remove as many African Americans as possible from the list of registered voters - 57,000 of them. If you were black and living anywhere in the sunshine state that year and you shared a name with a convicted felon anywhere in the United States, you weren't going to vote. Period. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that you were a sixty-seven year pastor of a small Baptist church in Tallahassee with the same name as a convicted crack addict in Buffalo. If you were planning on voting in 2000, you were shit-outta-luck, pardner! Of course, the fact that people of color tend to vote democratic is purely coincidental - Nudge! Nudge! Wink! Wink!

Four years later, on election day 2004, every exit poll had John Kerry winning the key battleground states of Ohio and New Mexico. Truth be told, I went to bed just after midnight, confident that the horrible era of the worst president in American history had come to a merciful end. When I got up at around four AM to check Kerry's margin of victory, my nephew, Chris Pennings, the lead singer/songwriter/ guitarist for the fabulous new band, SOUTHCOTT (Shameless plug) who was staying with me at the time, greeted me with the following words, "He won". I could tell by the look on his face just who "he" was. I was stunned. Or as the late, great comedian, Fred Allen, would say, "I was gasted right down to my flabbers"!

Once the shock wore off, I got good and angry. Not just at the tidal wave of human shit within the Bush crowd who were able to steal two elections but at the incredible naivete of the American electorate. In spite of the fact that Kerry and Al Gore won their respective contests, it should have been a landslide. I mean, let's face some serious facts here: Running against a disgusting cowboy wannabe like George W. Bush should have been the political equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.

More than a little bit of my rage was also directed at Gore and Kerry, both able and intelligent men, for running such jaw-droppingly dumb campaigns. The next democratic nominee, whoever he or she may be (Are you listening, Russ?) cannot run away from their natural base as they've been doing for the past quarter of a century. That is the only way we progressives - LIBERALS - will be able to regain control of our deplorably damaged system. By November of 2008, the American people will have had it up to here (Please note: I'm pointing at my forehead) with these atrocious bastards. This country is finally awakening from the right-wing coma that it's been snoozing under since it foolishly sent a feeble-minded, failed "B" movie actor by the name of Ronald Reagan to the White House twenty-six years ago.

There's a sleeping giant out there, Russ. Give him a little poke.

Pray for peace.

Tom Degan
Goshen, NY

tomdegan@frontiernet.net