Bush v. Gore, the Sixth Anniversary

Today marks six years since a fascist-dominated U.S. Supreme Court effectively stopped a vote re-count in Florida following the disputed 2000 voting in Florida. This egregious decision, derided and heavily criticized at the time by law professors across the country, installed George Walker Bush as President even though he lost the popular vote by over a half million votes. And it installed him without legitimacy in the Electoral College as later investigations by the well-known author and journalist, Greg Palast, showed. It also installed him with an outrageous decision claiming equal protection guarantees under the Constitution had been violated, then proclaimed that this reasoning was never to be used again in just this way -- only this once. Such a decision would have been considered laughable by legal experts except for the fact of its serious consequences.

Then came the perfidy of more vote fraud in 2004, as Republican operatives initiated program after program to tamp down the Democratic vote, with disastrous results in Ohio and elsewhere.

Thus, in a real sense, the last six years have been an exercise in illegitimacy. All the pandering of Bush by the media, all the frothy support by Republican zealots, all the sickening deference paid by Democrats -- all this has been ever so unnecessary and erroneous. For no President can hope to govern effectively without the support of the American people. We now know this as the Iraq War effort comes apart at the seams, and as a long-suffering populace is weighed down by ever-increasing personal debt and made half-mad with job insecurity.

I have not forgotten the evil which was perpetrated on the night of December 12, 2000, by five alleged jurists of the Supreme Court. So many people both here and abroad have suffered mightily. It is time to bring the suffering to an end. May this be in a near time.