TAKING CARE OF THE COUNTING       51

Aside from its untruth, moreover, the press's blithe assurance

that it would surely have investigated the election if only Kerry

had complained about it first reveals a serious civic misconcep-

tion. The First Amendment guarantees the freedom of the press

in order to keep the people well informed as to the govern-

ment's compliance with their will. Ours was conceived, and once

upon a time did really function, as an open government, with the

newspapers--however faulty--serving as the people's primary

means of political awareness, and therefore as a necessary brake

on tyranny. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state

of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

That much-quoted line of Thomas Jefferson's expresses the pro-

found belief in mass enlightenment that motivated him

throughout his public life and that the other Framers shared. It

was the ideal of an educated citizenry that inspired them not just

to guarantee the freedom of the press but also to realize it, by

providing newspapers (three in every state) with printing subsi-

dies; by setting up a Post Office equipped to reach the furthest

corners of the nation and dedicated mainly to the circulation of

newspapers (the cost of postage minimal);⁶⁵ and by limiting the

term of copyright so as to make all writings generally available

as soon as possible.

Such measures should remind us that the press, in this Re-

public, was conceived as free specifically, and only, to inform the

people. The Framers certainly did not require the press to strive

for "balance" in its treatment of the major parties--which did

not exist, of course, when they wrote the Constitution, and

which possess no rights under that document. The shibboleth of

"balance"--a rightist imposition on the press, as David Brock

explains--has actually absolved reporters from their civic obli-

gation to inform the people, as "balanced" journalists are those

who never dare to broach a topic or investigate a problem until

"the Democrats" or "the Repulicans" have brought it up and

thereby cleared it for the news. Thus "balance" blinds the press

to any problem on which both sides have decided to agree: "free

trade," for example, or the U.S. military budget, or until it was

too late, the Bush administration's education policy. And yet

"balance" has compelled the press to do far worse than merely

to avoid discussion of those policies that have overt bipartisan

support. Obligated to ignore whatever the Republicans-and-

Democrats won't mention, the press has shied away completely

from those even graver problems that both parties' leaders,

whether from perfidy or denial, cannot or will not acknowledge

or perceive. Such a problem, for example, is the rising theocratic

danger to American democracy itself--a threat now posed by the

Republicans-and Democrats, and one that we, the people, have

a right to know about, but which the press continues to avoid,

despite the looming risk both to itself and all the rest of us. Re-

publicans and Democrats included.

The press's silence on the mysteries of the last election is the

best possible example of the Fourth Estate's enormous civic fail-

ure. Whether Kerry had the right to pack it in before the votes

were counted is a question for the people to decide. Even if he

did posses that right, he was no more the final arbiter of the

election's soundness than was Bush or Cheney, or Tom Brokaw,

or Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., or Silvio Berlusconi, or Tom DeLay,

or Ahmed Chalabi. Whatever Kerry's handlers thought they

knew about the voters of Ohio (or of Florida, Arizona, North

Carolina, Texas of Tennessee),by the morning of November 3 it

was too soon to make the call that Bush had won. The press was

obligated, moreover, to respect neither Kerry's judgment nor

Bush & Co.'s mere reassertion of their power. Its mandate is to

respect--and even attempt to ascertain--the people's choice;

and that could be known only through a free and fair election,

which, demonstrably, had not occurred.

To nail every single lie by the Republicans in that "debate"

may threaten to obscure the more important fact that. . . . .

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. . . . In short, they hate democracy, for they

"do not like the results"--and so they won, although they did not

win, and could not win.

---

AN ORDERLY ELECTION    197

. . . .

The biggest loser in the race was Janet Reno, U.S. attorney

general under Clinton--and, prior to that, Florida's state attor-

ney, to which most Floridians had re-elected her four times. Fac-

ing Bill McBride for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination

(which would have meant that she, not he, would challenge Jeb

Bush in November), Reno seemed to lose by over 8,000 votes,

and conceded. Over the next few weeks, however, officials kept

"finding" thousands of new Reno votes until she had enough to

file a challenge--but not before it was too late to file.⁷⁰

(McBride, of course, went on to lose big-time--56 percent to 43

percent--to Governor Bush. "The victory made Bush the only

Republican governor ever to capture re-election in Florida,"

CBS News exulted.)⁷¹

To the evidence that there was something wrong with the ma-

chines, Jeb and his henchpersons responded, then and forever

afterward, that there was nothing wrong with the machines.

The problems in 2002 were due to "human error," Jacob DiPi-

etre, a spokesman for the governor, told Salon's Manjoo in 2004

(without divulging what that error was, or who the humans

were).⁷² Likewise, Glenda Hood, Katherine Harris's replace-

ment as Florida's secretary of state, told CNN a few weeks prior

to November 2, 2004: "The track record shows that, since 2002,

when electronic voting equipment's been used in Florida,...

we've delivered successful elections. There have not been prob-

lems with the equipment that's been used."⁷³

Such bald denial of inconvenient facts--from global warm-

ing (not a "human error") to the "war on terrorism" (going

beautifully) to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (both going

beautifully) to Dick Cheney's financial ties to Halliburton (he

has no financial ties to Halliburton), and on and on--is, of

course, the daily m.o. of the Bush regime, which seems inca-

pable of saying anything that does not contradict the truth. Yet,

the routine denial of its own illegitimate ascent is Bush/Ch-

eney's central and definitive falsehood, or delusion; for this

regime is essentially anti-secular, anti-rational, anti-republican

and anti-democratic, ironically posing as a champion of "free-

dom" and "democracy" throughout this world. The extinction

of democracy and freedom would appear to be the regime's

mission; and yet its soldiers have insisted all along that they re-

vere our democratic institutions (and the press has never called

them on it).

. . . .

In thus exempting touch-screen ballots from the manual re-

counts, Hood was not just stubbornly resisting the demand for

paper trails, but going even further in her drive to make the vote

unverifiable, and therefore that much easier to suppress. For no

good reason, she was urging that, in conducting manual re-

counts after close elections, state officials not consult the touch-

screen machines' internal logs.⁹⁶ Fully detailed and extraordinar-

ily precise, those logs document the day's electoral traffic with

the sort of specificity and clarity that would appear to justify the

use of electronic voting systems in the first place; indeed, the

logs are advertised by the marketers of touch-screen systems as

208     FOOLED   AGAIN

an excellent means for measuring the vote's integrity on each

machine. So intent was Hood on nullifying that protective fea-

ture that she engineered the proposition of a law to set her pol-

icy in stone. And so in March a strange new bill--filed in the

name of one Rivers Bufford III, a state elections department lob-

byist--was getting muscled through the legislature, dictating

that manual recounts in close elections need not include the

ballots cast on paperless machines. The ploy . . . . . . .

218     FOOLED   AGAIN

. . . . . . . . . . they rec-

ommended to the Gov that they 'pull the plug,'" Long wrote,

adding that the officials "weren't comfortable with the felon

matching program they've got." ¹²¹ Bush refused, and the next

day the latest list, with over 47,000 names, went out to Florida's

67 counties with instructions that they be purged from the

rolls. Jenny Nash, a spokesperson for Glenda Hood, assured

the public that this list was dead accurate--. . . .

. . . . . . .

The fact that Florida had once again devised a felons list, and

a secret one at that, provoked loud outrage from many quarters

(except, of course, the governor's). "Some [election] supervisors

question why the administration is making the move this close

to the election. Florida's primary is Aug. 31 and the general

election Nov. 2," AP reported on May 6.¹²³ " 'Why is the state

doing this now?' said Ion Sancho, the election supervisor in

Leon County.¹²⁴ 'Within three minutes we identified an individ-

ual who should not be on the list. Right off the bat,' he added.

'How do you make somebody prove on election day that they're

not a felon?' asked Kay Clem, Indian River County supervisor

and president of the Florida Association of Supervisors of Elec-

tion. 'I'd rather err on the side of letting them vote than not

vote.' "¹²⁵ Civil libertarians were also angrily incredulous. "I'm

sorry, but that list is suspect," said Berbara Petersen, president

of the First Amendment Foundation. "I just can't understand,

considering all of the trouble we went through four years ago,

why they wouldn't want anyone else to help them verify it."¹²⁶

268     FOOLED   AGAIN

By ignoring such repression, our media abetted it--while for-

eign journalists in the U.S. were well aware of it, as they too

were repressed. (They, of course, reported it to their respective

publics.) "Journalists from England, Sweden, Holland and other

friendly countries are being detained at U.S. airports, strip-

searched and deported," Salon reported on June 16.¹⁹ Here too

the regime turned up the heat as the campaign approached its

climax. On October 24, the Inter-American Press Association

formally criticized the U.S. government for restricting foreign

journalists' travels, and for using courts to order journalists to

neme their sources. (The statement was reported by AP, and the

Miami Herald ran it.)²⁰ As members of the U.S. press were silent

on the treatment of their foreign colleagues, so did they air or

publish nothing of the regime's censorship of U.S. news outlets

on foreign soil. On October 8, FBI agents in the UK seized the

global servers for the Independent Media Center (IndyMedia.

org), and kept them shut down for six days. The bureau gave no

explanation for the seizure, nor was there ever any mainstream

news about it here in the United States; and so Americans not

only didn't know about it at the time, to this day they don't

know about it.

Mark Crispin Miller < Added 8/21/'06