Bush Assumes US Presidency; First Reactions from Around the World

The Bush Coup

By Lionel Rolfe
19 December 2000

I guess Al Gore had no choice but to concede the election to the man who stole it from him. But I wish Gore really were the man he looks like, Clark Kent. I wish for just a moment he had acted like a Superman and told the truth. He would have had to tell us, "look, Bush is legally the president. But he still stole the election. He stole it with the help of his Republican friends on the high court".

I don't know if Gore would have been a good president. He does not have Clinton's charm or intelligence, but he was not entirely lacking in these things --certainly not to the degree that Bush is. And, in fact, I think he is a pretty smart fellow, and even a fairly decent one.

But damn it, civility is a very unimportant virtue when someone has just stolen the Democracy, and then wants you to be "civil" about it. Bush is the president because of a coup, as surely as if his daddy had ordered some old CIA operative friends to seize and kill all his son's opponents.

After that Orwellian Supreme Court election in which the court substituted its own vote for the vote of the people of Florida, who probably if the ballots were ever fairly counted favored Gore by 20,000 or 30,000 votes, you just knew the whole thing stank. It stinks worse than anything that's been done in this country since the Dred Scott Decision.

Are we going to need a Civil War before this is really worked out? Have no doubt about it. This country has been taken over by a gang of thugs, with the aid of a bunch of political hacks posing as Justices. They took over the Presidency right before our very eyes.

The whole thing was ominous right from the beginning. First the chairman of the Bush campaign in Florida, who also happens to be the Secretary of State and, by rumor, a lover of Jeb Bush, ignores all protests and announces that there can be no hand recount.

Mind you, the makers and inventors of the Votamatic, a vastly outmoded device created in the 1950s, said that in close elections the only way you can get a true count is by handcounting the votes the machine rejected. You can rest assured, it was not just by accident they sent the oldest Votamatics --the ones that persistently undercount-- to the poor black and Latino areas of Florida.

No, when Jeb told his brother he'd get him the state, he wasn't just whistling Dixie.

Gore noted this when he first conceded the state to Bush, based on television network projections, and then learned from the state's Attorney General, a Democrat, that it wasn't necessarily so.
I'm sure Gore knows enough about politics to realize what the candidate's brother was up to. So he told Bush, who complained to him that Jeb told him he'd won the state, something to the effect that "Jeb was not the only authority in Florida".

Boy, did Gore get that wrong. He didn't know just how dirty these guys play. He figured he had the votes. He never figured that these are people who will stop at nothing to get elected and simply ignore the votes, especially because they were cast by a bunch of blacks and Jews and poor Latinos, his political opponents.
It's almost like the Big Fix was in from the start.

It's been coming for a while. Nobody has talked much about how the Media has moved to the political right, ever since it started becoming so increasingly monopolized. It's now gotten to the point it was in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's days, when everyone understood the press was mostly owned by Republicans who hated him.

It's an untold story --and some buffoons still carry on about the liberal media --but the truth is just the opposite.

The relentless drum beat to coronet Bush has been coming from the Republican-controlled media for at least the month --and actually well before that.

One of the television pundits warned Gore in the last moments, even before the Supreme Court ruling, that journalists were tired of him because he was making them work too hard. He was getting on this pundit's nerves. How dare he?

Booh hooh. If they were really doing their job, they'd be screaming about the hijacking of the presidency. Objectively that's what's going on. The Bush team's valiant effort not to count votes was obscene, and should not have been permitted. It was crooked and hypocritical from moment one. I mean, the Guv apparently signed a voting bill in Texas that had much laxer standards on recounts than Florida.
So which is it, George W?

To be sure, the Republicans stole the election by "legal" means. But the media hardly mentions this. It goes on with how stubborn Gore was for refusing to accede to the robbery. Well, the media had the story backwards. What is interesting will be the effect of the coup. Minorities, labor unions and educators have to be the foot soldiers of the resistance because they will be the targets of Bush's presidency.
I think that all this will have a salutary effect, though, on the old civil rights coalition of the 1960s. I think you will see them coming alive again. Jeb Bush, brother of the presidential pretender, concentrated a lot of his shenanigans against black voters -there's been a kind of blood feud going on between Jeb and black voters in Florida anyway because the babyfaced guv has been doing his best to break every break blacks had won with affirmative action.

State troopers who saw carloads of blacks on the way to the polling place pulled them over and asked if they had "taxi" licenses. When they arrived at the precincts, they were told they couldn't vote because they had run out of ballots. Or they were told they weren't registered to vote, even though they were. Or if they did get to vote, they did so in urban precincts on old Votamatic machines that produced pregnant and hanging chads even if they were fully punched.

It was bizarre, suddenly hearing Republicans turn into a new principle of law that thou shalt never question the machine. It was eerie, and such utter crap.

If the machines don't count your vote, tough shit, they said. You're probably black or some other kind of undesirable anyway. They ridiculed the old folks who misvoted for Buchanan. All hail to the machine. Machines are perfect.

Of course it wasn't hard to figure out why they fought the recount so fiercely. They did because they knew Gore had the votes and they didn't. To me, one of the most amazing statements was by Justice Scalia, who ordered the recount stopped because he said that had to be done in order to protect the appearance that Bush won the election.

I'm surprised that Scalia didn't order the ballots burned in the final order, so that evidence of his perfidy was destroyed.

I won't even go into the question of all those old Holocaust victims who inadvertently voted for Buchanan. One old woman who had survived Auschwitz couldn't sleep for days because she realized she had voted for the man who made no bones about his love for Hitler.

Whoever dreamed that one up was really diabolical. Ha, ha, ha. We won't count black votes, and we'll get the old Jews to vote for Buchanan. Ha, ha, ha.

Let me tell you, these are diabolical motherfuckers. I don't know if they somehow engineered those butterfly ballots --but I can't help but suspect they did.

The old Kennedy assassin buffs used to say Mr. Bush's grandfather was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I don't know if that is true, but I couldn't help wondering why George W. Bush always looked so confident he would become president no matter what.

That's what I always hated about the Bushes. They are whining bullies who really will stop at nothing to get what they want. They all are imperious assholes who assume they should be on top. Yet, none of them are impressive human beings. They are not extraordinary. They have little to recommend them, except money and connections.

They always accused Gore of being willing to stop at nothing to win, but that was projection. These are really people who will stop at nothing. Guess what, folks, the fix was in big time, that's why Bush looks like Alfred E. Newman, the guy who says, "What, me worry?"

Bush didn't need to worry. He was going to become president no matter who got the most votes.
And now we have to figure out how to protect ourselves from these thugs the next few years.© The News Insider 2000Lionel Rolfe is the author of the ebook, Death and Redemption in London and L.A., available from http://www.deadendstreet.com/r6.html. He is also the author of Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in the Underground and In Search of Literary L.A., both available from Amazon.com.

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