Another socialist blog

This week’s Not a Team Player Award goes to Lynne Cheney, the wife of the Vice President, who has publicly opposed the gay marriage ban being debated now by the Senate. This puts her at odds with the Bush administration. Ms. Cheney says the states should decide whether to permit gay marriage, in contrast to Bush and Mr. Cheney, whose vocal support for states’ rights ends when states disagree with them.

“During the 2000 campaign,” reports ABC News, “vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney took the position states should decide legal issues about personal relationships and that people should be free to enter relationships of their choosing.” But for the 2004 election Bush and Dick Cheney are actively courting the anti-gay bigot vote, so out the window go both Dick Cheney’s tolerance, and his support for states’ rights.

Not to mention his gay daughter, Mary.

A lot of people opposed to capitalism in general, and the Bush administration in particular, have pointed out that those now in power have no particular love of democracy. Some of us have even made wild allegations that the Bush regime is simply fascist, and looking to dismantle what little democracy we presently enjoy in the U.S., and have been dismissed as hysterical for our trouble. Hold that thought.

Enter Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. Ridge follows the administration party line, unsupported by any evidence, that the September 11th attacks were motivated by hatred of democracy (as opposed to anger with American foreign policy). Ridge now asserts, again without presenting any evidence, that al Qaeda plans a terrorist attack to disrupt the U.S. elections this November. The political convenience of this claim is obvious: more terrorism fear is good for Bush, and if al Qaeda’s supposed target is the electoral process itself, then the terror will increase right up until election day.

But why stop at that? If they can postpone the election, they can prolong the terror, and just such a postponement is being openly contemplated. Bush may be permitted to put off the election until the time of his own choosing—i.e., whenever his propagandists have managed to turn around his poll numbers.

Let’s do the math together now: we are assured that the threat of terrorism is unending, therefore the so-called “War on Terror” is unending, which means the threat to disrupt the elections is ongoing, so therefore we may have to postpone the election for a long, long time. We’ll get back to you on that.

Stephen C. Pelletiere and Lt. Col. Douglas Johnson of the US Army War College have challenged one of the most cherished propaganda treasures of the U.S. war effort: that Saddam Hussein deliberately used poison gas against Iraqi Kurds.

A report prepared by the top CIA official handling the matter says Iran, not Iraq, carried out the gas attack at Halabja, which the U.S. has publicly blamed on Saddam. Further, evidence of the gas attack at Amadiyyah, also blamed on Saddam, is limited to eyewitness reports collected by the U.S. No bodies were produced to support the allegations of a gas attack, and the eyewitness reports did not describe symptoms that match any known chemical.

It would be shocking indeed if the Bush administration were caught using Big Lie tactics again, would it not?

See my previous entry on the gassing of Iraqis by the British, for which Winston Churchill was not punished but rather rewarded.

I’ve taken up the topic of electronic voting security on several previous occasions. Now The Register presents a well-thought-out article on getting electronic voting security right. The main point is not the obvious one:

[T]he paper trail remains security fool’s gold, made popular merely because it’s easily grasped. What’s needed instead are commonsense security protocols to make e-voting systems resistant to tampering, to make it evident when tampering has occurred, and to make it possible to stage a reliable recount.