Mark Crispin Miller on the Pilfered Presidency
Monday, 16 January 2006
Later this week, we'll be reviewing Mark Crispin Miller's important -- nay, vital -- new book, \ Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too, both in the Moscow Times and on this website. Meanwhile, below is an excerpt of Part I of truth-teller Miller's interview with Buzzflash this week.
BuzzFlash: Your book...makes a convincing case that Bush/Cheney stole the last election. It's not mere speculation, but a solid survey of appalling facts, all of them carefully documented. And yet there are a lot of people out there, many of them liberals, who seem unable or unwilling to accept the possibility that this administration would resort to vast election fraud.
But that view seems ever more absurd, as the Bush Republicans keep making flagrant moves to thwart democracy by rigging the electoral system to their own advantage. For instance, Bush has recently made two astonishing appointments to the Federal Elections Commission. One is Hans von Spakovsky, who helped Bush/Cheney steal the Florida election in 2000. The other is Robert D. Lenhard, the husband of Viveca Novak-the Time reporter who tipped off Karl Rove's lawyer that Matt Cooper, her colleague at the magazine, knew that Rove had outed Valerie Plame. So Rove went back to testify again to the grand jury, to tell them he had come across an e-mail that reminded him that he did meet with Cooper. So now the husband of this woman has been nominated to the FEC! What are we to make of such gross impropriety? Bill Clinton never could have got away with it.
Mark Crispin Miller: Let me begin by making a general point. When a movement tries to force an alien agenda on a democratic nation, it must devote itself full-time to that endeavor. The subversion of electoral democracy must be the movement's overriding goal, because it's very difficult to disenfranchise a majority. It takes vast planning and tremendous effort, and a ton of laundered cash. In short, it has to be that movement's main concern; and I believe that it is Bush/Cheney's main concern, and that it is the main concern of the regime's most fervent backers.
Because the US press refuses to go near the issue of election fraud, it's easy to assume that Bush & Co.'s subversion of the last election was just one of many dark endeavors. That assumption would be dangerously wrong. The subversion of American democracy is the primary interest of the Bush Republicans, whose vast electoral shenanigans were but a part of their ongoing program - a program not at all conservative, but anti-democratic and anti-republican.
So the appointment of those two party agents to the FEC is an especially brazen example of the Busheviks' subversion of American democracy. Of course, the right would say, and probably has said, that such a move is merely a pre-emptive strike against those evil liberals who would stack the FEC to further their nefarious agenda. But that would merely be the usual projective nonsense. Bush/Cheney's moves against the FEC are moves against the possibility of real American democracy. In this they are identical to the regime's deliberate placement of religious maniacs and corporate goons atop the entire edifice of federal power: slash-and-burn types running the Department of Interior and EPA, creationists and anti-sex fanatics running scientific agencies, and so on. Such flagrant strokes against the public interest are not motivated just by greed alone, but by a deeper animus against democracy itself - or, to be more accurate, against the whole program of the Enlightenment.
BuzzFlash: Is anything more brazen or cynical than such appointments?
Mark Crispin Miller: Brazen, certainly; but I am not convinced that it's entirely cynical. This is a faith-based movement, which means that we cannot just write off everything they do as mere manipulation by cynics who secretly know better. That some of them are Machiavellian there is no doubt, but there's a pathological component, an apocalyptic drive, that we ignore at our own peril.
What often seems to be mere breath-taking cynicism is, as well, a sort of self-delusion, or self-hypnosis, common to fanatical movements of all kinds, religious and otherwise. These are people who themselves are in the very audience they're always working to arouse. On some level they believe that, if they say something repeatedly and loud enough, it will not just make everybody else believe it, but it will actually make it true. It is that faith-based self-deception that makes the movement deeply frightening - and incomprehensible - to rational observers. There is no arguing with that mentality, which poses a far greater worldly threat than all the humanistic interests on Earth combined.
They respect no worldly powers other than themselves, and so they've set about the reconstruction of our government, to operate it wholly by themselves in their own interests. If it were up to them, there would be no special prosecutors. There would be no independent authorities capable of passing any judgment on them or of enforcing any rules that they would rather not follow. If it were up to them, there would be no parties but their own. It's staggering, but surely less astonishing than the refusal of "the liberal media" to give it the attention it deserves. The Bush regime could not do what it has been doing if there were the kind of blunt debate and spirited resistance that we have every right to look for in a rational democratic polity.
Link Here
Later this week, we'll be reviewing Mark Crispin Miller's important -- nay, vital -- new book, \ Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too, both in the Moscow Times and on this website. Meanwhile, below is an excerpt of Part I of truth-teller Miller's interview with Buzzflash this week.
BuzzFlash: Your book...makes a convincing case that Bush/Cheney stole the last election. It's not mere speculation, but a solid survey of appalling facts, all of them carefully documented. And yet there are a lot of people out there, many of them liberals, who seem unable or unwilling to accept the possibility that this administration would resort to vast election fraud.
But that view seems ever more absurd, as the Bush Republicans keep making flagrant moves to thwart democracy by rigging the electoral system to their own advantage. For instance, Bush has recently made two astonishing appointments to the Federal Elections Commission. One is Hans von Spakovsky, who helped Bush/Cheney steal the Florida election in 2000. The other is Robert D. Lenhard, the husband of Viveca Novak-the Time reporter who tipped off Karl Rove's lawyer that Matt Cooper, her colleague at the magazine, knew that Rove had outed Valerie Plame. So Rove went back to testify again to the grand jury, to tell them he had come across an e-mail that reminded him that he did meet with Cooper. So now the husband of this woman has been nominated to the FEC! What are we to make of such gross impropriety? Bill Clinton never could have got away with it.
Mark Crispin Miller: Let me begin by making a general point. When a movement tries to force an alien agenda on a democratic nation, it must devote itself full-time to that endeavor. The subversion of electoral democracy must be the movement's overriding goal, because it's very difficult to disenfranchise a majority. It takes vast planning and tremendous effort, and a ton of laundered cash. In short, it has to be that movement's main concern; and I believe that it is Bush/Cheney's main concern, and that it is the main concern of the regime's most fervent backers.
Because the US press refuses to go near the issue of election fraud, it's easy to assume that Bush & Co.'s subversion of the last election was just one of many dark endeavors. That assumption would be dangerously wrong. The subversion of American democracy is the primary interest of the Bush Republicans, whose vast electoral shenanigans were but a part of their ongoing program - a program not at all conservative, but anti-democratic and anti-republican.
So the appointment of those two party agents to the FEC is an especially brazen example of the Busheviks' subversion of American democracy. Of course, the right would say, and probably has said, that such a move is merely a pre-emptive strike against those evil liberals who would stack the FEC to further their nefarious agenda. But that would merely be the usual projective nonsense. Bush/Cheney's moves against the FEC are moves against the possibility of real American democracy. In this they are identical to the regime's deliberate placement of religious maniacs and corporate goons atop the entire edifice of federal power: slash-and-burn types running the Department of Interior and EPA, creationists and anti-sex fanatics running scientific agencies, and so on. Such flagrant strokes against the public interest are not motivated just by greed alone, but by a deeper animus against democracy itself - or, to be more accurate, against the whole program of the Enlightenment.
BuzzFlash: Is anything more brazen or cynical than such appointments?
Mark Crispin Miller: Brazen, certainly; but I am not convinced that it's entirely cynical. This is a faith-based movement, which means that we cannot just write off everything they do as mere manipulation by cynics who secretly know better. That some of them are Machiavellian there is no doubt, but there's a pathological component, an apocalyptic drive, that we ignore at our own peril.
What often seems to be mere breath-taking cynicism is, as well, a sort of self-delusion, or self-hypnosis, common to fanatical movements of all kinds, religious and otherwise. These are people who themselves are in the very audience they're always working to arouse. On some level they believe that, if they say something repeatedly and loud enough, it will not just make everybody else believe it, but it will actually make it true. It is that faith-based self-deception that makes the movement deeply frightening - and incomprehensible - to rational observers. There is no arguing with that mentality, which poses a far greater worldly threat than all the humanistic interests on Earth combined.
They respect no worldly powers other than themselves, and so they've set about the reconstruction of our government, to operate it wholly by themselves in their own interests. If it were up to them, there would be no special prosecutors. There would be no independent authorities capable of passing any judgment on them or of enforcing any rules that they would rather not follow. If it were up to them, there would be no parties but their own. It's staggering, but surely less astonishing than the refusal of "the liberal media" to give it the attention it deserves. The Bush regime could not do what it has been doing if there were the kind of blunt debate and spirited resistance that we have every right to look for in a rational democratic polity.
Link Here
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 2:46 PM
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