Loosey Goosey Hits The Wall - Road to the Middle Class

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 importantÃ¢â‚¬â€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

Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Home

American Manifesto

Chapters

Chappies

roadtothemiddleclass

presented by Christopher Chantrill

Follow @chrischantrill • Contact