It can have fatal consequences. The national media seem like sport promoters, cheering their chosen candidate Al Gore as he maneuvers an army of lawyers and his team of partisan Democratic vote counters and judges to steal the election in which Florida voters rejected him. The media treats this as if it were a weekend football game, full of drama signifying nothing, even though it may elevate an unethical loser to the Presidency of our country. What we are witnessing is a coup d etat, the overthrow of the legitimately chosen President. It is an attempt not only to steal the White House from the rightly-elected George W. Bush, but also to steal the votes and government of the American people.
Coups have consequences.
In 1960 the father of Al Gore s campaign manager Bill Daley, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, used voodoo voting to conjure thousands of ghost voters from his city s graveyards. These phony ballots tipped the balance against Vice President Richard Nixon and made media-darling John F. Kennedy President. Today in Washington, D.C., a black wall carries the names of more than 58,000 Americans killed in a then-obscure place called Vietnam. More than a million Americans were wounded, and millions of others like my Idaho caller carry lifelong scars in their souls from this war. Our society, values, and politics remain crippled, and vast national treasure was squandered because of that war.