The Frankfurter School

If you haven’t watched the HBO movie “Recount” yet, you should. It is a painful, sometimes funny, and fairly accurate reminder of the chain of events that led to the installation of George W. Bush as President in 2000. I will never forget the horror with which we all watched the events unfold at the time, powerless to stop it, but with the natural disappointment and acceptance of supporting the losing side in a tough battle. Eight years later, a real clarity is possible to achieve, through hindsight and dispassionate historical examination. A fresh look at the facts and events reveals one thing very clearly: a well-planned and forcefully executed coup d’état occurred in the United States of America.

After watching the film, I came across a report on touch screen voting by Dan Rather on his HDNet news show that provided new information that I had never before seen reported: the paper ballots that led to thousands of disqualified votes had been altered by Sequoia Voting Systems to cause them to malfunction and create “hanging chads.” The shocking story comes at around forty minutes into the broadcast, as employees of the company explain how they were instructed to “short” the ballots for Palm Beach county to account for “humidity,” which was then demonstrated to create problems like hanging chads.

After considering the information in this account, and a review of the facts provided by the docu-drama “Recount,” the chain of events looks like this:

• Pre-election polling indicated that the race would be very close and that a victory in one swing state could decide the election.
• the brother of the Republican candidate for President, Jeb Bush, was the governor of Florida, and the state co-chair of the Bush Presidential campaign, Katherine Harris, was the official in charge of overseeing the election
• months before the election, Katherine Harris disenfranchised tens of thousands of democratic-leaning voters, by hiring ChoicePoint, a Republican-owned data company, to purge voter registration lists of all names that were remotely similar to lists of people who had been convicted of felonies.
• paper ballots were manufactured below normal standards to ensure that chaos would reign in certain (democratic-leaning) districts, throwing the election into the hands of state officials.
• the FOX News employee responsible for looking at data and making the official call to award a state to a candidate was named Bush, and was the cousin of the candidate. FOX called Florida for Bush, the other networks immediately followed, and Gore was on the defensive for the next 30 days fighting the perception of being a “sore loser”
• the US Supreme Court stepped in to halt the Florida court-ordered vote count, and Republican appointees to the court wrote the only decision in the entire history of the court that was not meant to set precedent or ever be referred to again effectively handing power to the son of the man who was either Vice President or President when 5 of them were appointed.
• when the votes were later counted and totaled by a consortium of news organizations, Gore was shown to have won the state of Florida

coup d’état:

(Merriam-Webster) a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics.

(American Heritage) The sudden overthrow of a government by a usually small group of persons in or previously in positions of authority.

(Wikipedia) the coup d’état is a type of political engineering, generally violent (hence “strike”, “blow”; French “coup”), but not always, yet differing from a revolution (by a larger, armed group to effect violent, radical change to the political system) in that the change is to the government, not the form of government.