Hi Everybody!
Another selection from my friend Peter Rice: "... guess what?
Notwithstanding doctored news articles in Fahrenheit 9/11 , every single
analysis by every major news organization found that no matter the rules
for a recount, President Bush won, fair and square."
Perhaps of interest, Peter Rice
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The Washington Times
September 29, 2004
Editorial
Jimmy Carter's jeremiad
Rarely is a political notion so thoroughly discredited as the idea that
Florida's black voters were intimidated, harassed or intentionally
disenfranchised at the polls in 2000. Someone should tell Jimmy Carter.
Earlier this week, in an op-ed, the former president warned of a repeat
of Florida's electoral fiasco and resurrected the race canard by
suggesting that racial motivations contributed to the Florida voting
mess four years ago. "Several thousand ballots of African Americans were
thrown out on technicalities" in 2000, he wrote, imputing a connection.
He then lambasted Florida officials for a recent dust-up over a list of
alleged felons to be disqualified from voting, apparently because
"22,000 [are] African Americans" — "likely Democrats," Mr. Carter
helpfully reminds us.
The former president seems a little abstracted from the current facts on
the ground. In case he missed it, first came the June 2001 report from
the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The report, a long-awaited
announcement on problems in the Florida count, announced it had found no
evidence existed that Florida's black voters were intimidated, harassed
or otherwise intentionally disenfranchised at the polls the previous
November. Voters "confronted inexperienced poll workers, antiquated
machinery, inaccessible polling locations, and other barriers to being
able to exercise their right to vote," the commission found, but they
did not experience any intentional obstruction as they cast their ballots.
Next, the question was revisited in 2002 by the Justice Department's
Civil Rights Division. It, too, turned up nothing.
So why bring back these demagogic assertions now? Clearly Mr. Carter is
engaged in some electoral politicking. He lambastes Florida's voting
officials for being "highly partisan." That's a curious assertion, since
it seems that he has deliberately shut out Florida's top election
officials in recent years. In a phone interview yesterday, Florida
Secretary of State Glenda Hood, the presumed target of much of Mr.
Carter's ire, told us that neither he nor any of his staff has made an
effort to contact her since she assumed her position in February 2003.
She also claims that no one in her office has heard from him or his
staff since 2000.
Clearly, Mr. Carter's move is a blatant attempt to scare up voters in
Florida and tilt the playing field to the Democratic Party's advantage.
That's to be expected in an election year, but we were surprised to see
a former president stooping to such depths in pursuit of those ends. He
could at least admit that he is trying to help his Democratic Party,
rather than the democratic process.
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Jimmy Carter's Election Fraud
By Joel Mowbray
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 29, 2004
Finally, Jimmy Carter—a man who has given the thumbs up to the
“elections” of some of the world’s worst tyrants—has found an election
with which he can take issue.
Too bad the one place in the world he is willing to single out for
scolding—preemptively—is Florida. (And expect the DNC to be waving it in
the event of a close race there.)
In an op-ed piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, the former peanut
farmer with a fondness for despots warned that a travesty might be
brewing in the sunshine state. Capturing the essence of the polemic is
its second paragraph:
The disturbing fact is that a repetition of the problems of 2000 now
seems likely, even as many other nations are conducting elections that
are internationally certified to be transparent, honest and fair.
What Carter doesn’t say directly—but spends 700 words implying—is that
the balloting the Carter Center has overseen in 50 nations is
universally superior to what happened (and he believes will happen
again) in Florida. Which might not be so bad if his outfit had been
battle-tested in places like the United Kingdom or Australia.
But no, his expertise comes from giving credibility to terrorists and
tyrants, like Yasser Arafat and Hugo Chavez.
Mr. Habitat for Humanity’s chief concern with Florida is the “highly
partisan” nature of the state’s election officials:
Four years ago, the top election official, Florida Secretary of State
Katherine Harris, was also the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney state
campaign committee. The same strong bias has become evident in her
successor, Glenda Hood, who was a highly partisan elector for George W.
Bush in 2000.
All that was missing was the usual blather about how Bush was “selected,
not elected” or that he was “elected President by five men in robes.”
None of this is to suggest that what happened in Florida was a shining
moment for American balloting, but never in the history of the world has
so much scrutiny been applied to any electoral process. And guess what?
Notwithstanding doctored news articles in Fahrenheit 9/11 , every single
analysis by every major news organization found that no matter the rules
for a recount, President Bush won, fair and square.
Was Florida perfect? Of course not. Not even Jimmy Carter could point to
an election anywhere that ever was. But if anybody could talk about
dictators disguising themselves as democrats through fixed elections, it
would be our 39th President.
Because of provisions in the infamous Oslo Accords, Palestinians in 1996
had their first—and to date, only—opportunity to elect their own leader.
Not that they had much of a choice, though.
Controlling all major television and radio, Yasser Arafat made sure that
he dominated the airwaves. Editors and reporters at newspapers not
directly under Arafat’s thumb were threatened and intimidated with
beatings and arrests. And Arafat’s sole opponent was a 72-year-old
woman, a social worker named Samiha Khalil who got, in the words of the
New York Times, a “surprisingly high” 9 percent of the vote.
Hardly the stuff of a real election, yet Carter described this mess as
“open and fair.”
Carter’s love of thugs has not waned over the years. Last month, he
certified the widely condemned referendum in which Venezuelan dictator
Hugo Chavez supposedly won by a wide margin of 59-to-41.
Exit polling conducted by the highly regarded Penn, Schoen &Berland
Associates, however, found the exact opposite result: 59 percent opposed
the communist “President,” with only 41 percent in favor.
As explained by the Wall Street Journal’s Mary O’Grady , Carter lacked
the ability to prove the exit polls wrong (which could not have been 36
points off), because he only had access to a sampling of the
easy-to-manipulate software tabulations printed out by voting booths.
Not that it stopped him, though.
It should come as no surprise that Carter sided with the despot over a
respected (Democratic) polling firm. Not just because of his disturbing
track record, but because he and Chavez share a close, mutual friend:
Fidel Castro.
In a stomach-turning first-person essay on his trip to Cuba in May 2002
that reads like a “My summer vacation with a bloodthirsty tyrant,” Jimmy
Carter writes, “President Castro and I had a friendly chat about growing
peanuts” on the way to the hotel, and then later “[t]hat evening
President Castro and I had a general discussion of issues and then
enjoyed an ornate banquet.”
With prose that might make even Castro’s PR flacks blush, Carter
lavishes praise on Cuba’s “superb systems of health care and universal
education,” “a remarkable medical school,” and the “amazing musical and
dance performances” of “mentally retarded and physically handicapped
children.” Then, this doozy: that the “fundamental right [of civil
liberties enjoyed by Americans to change laws] is also guaranteed to
Cubans.”
What Carter neglected to ment
[excessive length snipped]
©2004 Pete Theisen |
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