home  |  book  |

Ward Churchill is Right Social Security Grand Strategy

print view

Loosey-goosey Hits the Wall

by Christopher Chantrill
February 27, 2005 at 5:49 pm

|

SHED a tear for the Democrats.  They didn’t just lose the presidency in November 2004.  Their whole loosey-goosey approach to voting hit the wall.  In the middle of the splat is Washington State’s dead-heat gubernatorial contest between Dino Rossi and Christine Gregoire.  As the election is contested in the courts, we are finally getting to look inside the sausage factory.

If you want the color commentary about Democrats and election trickery, you should buy talk-show-host-and-blogger-extraordinaire Hugh Hewitt’s If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat.  You will read a gripping story that begins back in the days of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall.  But to get the play-by-play, you should check in every morning with KTTH Seattle morning host Mike Siegel, Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF) President Bob Williams and Stefan Sharkansky of www.soundpolitics.com as they take Democratic wieners off the line in liberal King County and slice them up.

Last November, in sensitive, compassionate Seattle, the election laws were routinely flouted and ignored.  Against the law, according to EFF: “At least 8,419 more votes were cast in five counties than the number of people who signed in to vote.”  Against the law, hundreds of felons got to vote.  Against the law, hundreds of provisional ballots got mixed in with regular ballots.  Ballots were left unsecured.  Some precincts ran out of ballots and election officials went to Kinko’s to print up more.  The American Thinker has already covered this story here and here.

It gets worse.  The Washington State legislature passed a law in 2003 to conform state law to the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, but Secretary of State Sam Reed failed to issue regulations to implement the law.  You can read Evergreen Freedom Foundation’s report  here.

All this didn’t happen in Boss Tweed’s corrupt New York City.  Oh no.  It happened in sensitive, educated, liberal Seattle.

But let us be understanding towards the Democrats.  They realize that their voters cannot be relied upon to get registered months in advance of an election, or to have remembered to bring the right identification, or even to have figured out where to vote.  So Democrats have consistently pushed for relaxation of the rules governing elections, allowing people to cast a “provisional ballot” at a precinct if their name doesn’t appear on the voter’s register.  President Clinton’s Motor Voter Law made it easier to register to vote.  But gradually, step-by-step, year by year, as the election laws were relaxed, fraud and abuse tiptoed in.  That was the idea, as the Motor Voter Law “imposed fraud-friendly rules” on the states, according to John Fund in Stealing Elections.

In the good old days the politicians and the media would have laughed it off, as they did when “Landslide Lyndon” Johnson squeaked to a Senate victory in 1948 with the infamous ballot box 13, and as they did when Jack Kennedy was elected president with the help of skilled political professionals from Richard Daley’s Chicago and Lyndon Johnson’s Texas.  But now we have bloggers and talk radio.  Now, all of a sudden, the good old boys aren’t laughing any more.

There’s a bigger story to loosey-goosey than merely counting the votes.  It was John Kerry’s loosey-goosey story about his Vietnam service that inspired the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, and it was CBS’s loosey-goosey story about President Bush’s National Guard service that provoked Blogger Nation into checking their documents for verisimilitude.  The loosey-goosey tradition of “no enemies on the left” in the academy is hitting the wall as Ward Churchill finds himself uninvited at colleges all over America.  And Eason Jordan’s loosey-goosey story about the U.S. military “targeting journalists” hit the wall at the February 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos with the help of a blogger.  Loosey-goosey just doesn’t cut it any more.

In the real world outside the loosey-goosey sector, things are different.  In the globalized business sector, the watchword is “transparency.”  It means: trust, following the rules, no secrets, no surprises. 

But in the American loosey-goosey sector, transparency operates like a one-way mirror.  We get to look at everything you do, but you don’t get to look at us, because we are politicians and we care about people, or we are college professors and we have academic freedom, or we are journalists, protectors of the peoples’ right to know.

Loosey-goosey has its place.  Nobody minds if two people in a trust relationship cut each other some slack.  But when they cut each other slack to screw a third person, that is different.  You can call it what you like: betrayal, cheating, fraud, conspiracy.  You could call it Washington State.

On conservative website www.Lucianne.com they recently put up a tag to their FAQ link for online posters: “We are conservatives.  Rules are important.”  Like Wile E. Coyote, Democrats eternally hope that some Acme Corner-cutting Kit will help them catch the Roadrunner.  They can’t seem to learn that rules are important—because they help you win.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

 

 TAGS

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

 •  Contact