Hatred and Politics

Politics in America is a contact sport. Passions flare and the rhetoric can get heated and nasty. Political parties stoke these fires, playing on people's fears as a key fund-raising tactic.

Conservative authors have produced books with insulting titles like "If Democrats Had Any Brains, They Would Be Republicans" and "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder." The political left counters with ugly titles like "The I Hate Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh... Reader," "The I Hate Dick Cheney... Reader," and "The I Hate George W. Bush Reader."

It is ironic, yet natural, that the political left dominates hate literature. The irony is that the left championed "hate crimes" legislation. Having outlawed public expressions of hatred against various groups -- racial, linguistic, sexual orientation, etc.-- the left sees nothing hypocritical about fomenting hatred toward people of a different political orientation. Even if the "hate" authors don't personally hate Bush et al., people on the left must realize how such ugly language can poison susceptible minds.

While ironic, it is not surprising that hatred of political opponents is so virulent on the left. Hatred has long been a central pillar of leftist ideologies, premised as they are on trampling individual rights for the sake of a collectivist plan. Karl Marx boasted that he was "the greatest hater of the so-called positive." In 1923, V.I. Lenin chillingly declared to the Soviet Commissars of Education, "We must teach our children to hate. Hatred is the basis of communism." In his tract "Left-Wing Communism," Lenin went so far as to assert that hatred was "the basis of every socialist and Communist movement."

Indeed, it is easy to see the thread of hatred running through the various illiberal regimes of history, whether Soviet or Chinese communism or Hitler's national socialism. Only hatred could explain the willingness to kill, enslave, and rob vast numbers of innocent human beings. Hatred corrodes one's conscience. Under its toxic influence, a person will regard man's God-given right to be secure in his life, liberty, and property as nuisances to be overcome, not commandments to be obeyed. The flip side of hatred is an inflated self-love, self-importance, and self-righteousness so extreme that respect for other human beings diminishes and, in extreme cases (Stalin, Mao, Castro, Kim, et al.), disappears.

An incident recounted in the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago illustrates this mental deformity (see "Thank You, Alexander Solzhenitsyn"). Soviet officials wanted to transport heavier loads of steel by railroad. When railroad engineers said that heavier loads would break down the tracks, they were shot as saboteurs of progress. When the loads were then increased, the tracks indeed broke down. Political goals could not nullify the principles of engineering.

A leftist conceit is that will-power can change the way the world works. It can't. This mad tendency persists today; signs of it are all around. A recent letter to the editor angrily insisted that the law of supply and demand didn't cause high gasoline prices, but that (what else?) evil oil companies did. The writer then vilified Americans for using too much gasoline (thereby contradicting his earlier statement that demand was irrelevant). So full of hatred is this writer that he spews contempt for economic laws. In his arrogant egotism, he blames the world's problems on the fact that millions of people make choices that he-who fancies himself more enlightened and morally superior to his fellows-thinks they shouldn't make. Welcome to the soul of leftism/illiberalism.

Hatred of individuals for ideological reasons is pathetic to behold. After conservative journalist Tony Snow passed on from a horrible disease (see "Tony Snow: Defender of the President and the Faith"), posters on the leftwing blog Daily Kos wrote "rest in hell" and "[I hope] there really is a hell and [Snow]'s burning in it now." How tragically self-demeaning such hatred is. It is a great sickness of spirit.

More recently, Gov. Sarah Palin has been the object of vicious vituperation and seething hatred (like the threat by comedienne Sandra Bernhard that Palin would be gang-raped if she campaigns in New York City). Perhaps her female attackers feel rebuked by her decision to choose life for babies. Perhaps they feel inadequate by comparison. When I see their contorted faces and hear the desperate unhappiness in their voices, I feel sorry for them and pray that the venom might leave their hearts.

Source

***********************

Virginia Officials Illegally Discard Military Votes, Allow Out-of-State Votes

In Virginia's liberal Fairfax County, officials are illegally discarding absentee ballots cast by members of the military based on a technical requirement that is preempted by federal law. Meanwhile, people who live out-of-state are being allowed to vote (some people have boasted of being registered to vote, and voting, both in Virginia and another state) in Virginia elections, contrary to state law, based on instructions from liberal state voting officials and false claims by liberal advocacy groups.

The Washington Examiner reports on October 24 that "Fairfax County elections officials are rejecting about 200 overseas ballots, many of them from members of the military, saying the voters failed to observe a minor technicality in filling out their absentee forms." As retiring Congressman Tom Davis notes, that technicality "violates federal law" through its "disparate treatment of overseas voters."

"The State Board of Elections last week instructed county officials to adhere to the letter of the [state] law," even though it is preempted by contrary federal law. Officials at the State Board of elections are appointed by liberal Governor Tim Kaine.

Meanwhile, that same Board of Elections ordered Norfolk registrar Elisa J. Long to ignore state law by allowing college students not domiciled in Virginia to register and vote in Virginia elections.

The military votes in Fairfax County are being discarded by long-time Democratic operative Rokey Suleman, who became the Fairfax County registrar (a supposedly non-partisan position) after long being "active in Ohio Democratic politics." Suleman earlier sent staffers into the Fairfax County jail to register criminals to vote.

Source (See the original for links)

**************************

Voter fraud last time

The problem of voter fraud today is thoroughly revealed in a recent book by Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books). One of the best features of that book is that it reveals what really happened in Florida in 2000: The Democrats tried to steal the election for Gore, but failed.

On the day after the election, Bush was declared the winner in Florida by 1,784 votes. Gore kept demanding broader and broader recounts, which were conducted in heavily Democrat counties mostly by Democrat party officials. Bush's margin kept declining, but he kept winning the recounts by hundreds of votes. Finally, Gore won a decision by the notoriously liberal fiction writers on the Florida Supreme Court, who began rewriting Florida election law to require a new statewide hand recount without clear uniform standards for each county. Both because the state court was changing the election rules as specified by the legislature, and because the counties would do the recount without uniform statewide standards, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the mandated recount violated the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. With the recounts ended, the Florida Secretary of State declared Bush the final winner by 537 votes.

After all the shouting was over, a consortium of major news organizations conducted their own thorough Florida recount. Despite well-developed Democrat mythology, supported by an idiotically irresponsible HBO movie on the controversy, the New York Times reported the results as follows: "A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward."

But Fund shows that only widespread Democrat vote fraud made the election as close as it was. The highly liberal Palm Beach Post conducted an investigation concluding that the county had illegally allowed 5,600 convicted felons to vote. Felons, of course, vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, apparently seeing them as soul mates. By contrast, Democrat lawyers won a motion to disqualify 1,420 military ballots because they didn't have a foreign postmark (which most likely resulted because the ballots were sent back through the U.S. military rather than foreign post offices). Those serving in the U.S. armed forces overwhelmingly vote Republican.

The national TV networks declared that Florida's polls were closed at 7 p.m. Eastern time, even though the polls in the heavily Republican Florida panhandle were still open for another hour because they are in Central time. Fund notes that CBS broadcast 33 erroneous statements between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. that Florida's polls were closed. NBC followed almost immediately by other networks even called the state for Gore at 7:48 pm Eastern time. Fund cites Democrat and Republican pollsters, as well as academics, who concluded that this cost Bush a net loss of close to 10,000 votes.

Most importantly of all, Fund conducts a detailed analysis of Palm Beach County election return anomalies, buttressed by local interviews, to conclude that Bush was deprived of another 15,000 votes through a little scam known as double punching. After the polls closed, Democrat election officials appeared to have taken dozens of the punch hole ballots at a time, and punched through the little box for Gore on all of them, using a nail or pencil. For ballots that had been voted for Bush, this would have resulted in invalid ballots that appeared to have been punched for both Bush and Gore. For ballots that had been voted for Gore, this would have had no effect, because the nail or pencil would have just pushed through a box that had already been punched out for Gore.

Washington State

Fortuitously, what Gore was trying to do by seeking recount after recount in Florida was demonstrated in the Governor's race in the state of Washington in 2004. On election night that year, Republican Dino Rossi had apparently won the Governor's race over Democrat Christine Gregoire by 3,000 votes.

Washington is comprised of heavily Democrat Seattle and King County, surrounded by a sea of Republican counties. Democrats in King County first focused on provisional ballots that were legally invalid because they were not signed or the signatures did not match the voter registration on record. (Provisional ballots are ballots that are cast because the voter does not appear on the registration rolls, so his vote is taken and kept to be verified later if possible.) Even though federal law requires the identity of such voters to be kept private, the Democrats found a judge who ordered that the names and addresses of these provisional voters be given to the Democrat party so they could go to the residence of each one and get the signatures straightened out.

Doing this only in the overwhelmingly Democrat county but not the others obviously would generate a lot more votes for the Democrat candidate. Fund further reports how the process worked, writing, "Democrats spent the next three days knocking on doors and speed dialing voters..Democrat volunteers asked if voters had cast ballots for Ms. Gregoire. 'If they say no we just tell them to have a nice day,'..Only if they said yes did the Democrats ask if they wanted to make their ballots valid." Gregoire got a net gain of 400 votes this way.

Then just two days before the final vote was to be certified, King County announced that it had found another 10,000 absentee ballots. Rossi's lead was soon down to 261 votes. That was enough to require a mandatory machine recount of all votes. Fund reports, "But in King County the recount went beyond running the ballots through the counting machines. Officials there 'enhanced' 710 votes that had been rejected by the machines, in some cases altering them with white out or filling in the ovals on the optical scan ballots." This netted another 219 votes for Gregoire, reducing Rossi's lead to 42 votes.

Democrats demanded and won yet another statewide hand recount. During that recount, heavily Democrat King County found another 561 ballots, more than a month after the election, that had been rejected because election officials couldn't find the voter's original signature in the registration records. Two days later, they found another 22 ballots hidden in voting machines that were already in storage, not sealed and secured in any boxes. "Another treasure hunt turned up 150 more votes that had been mistakenly put into storage," Fund reports. Meanwhile, in the hand recount, officials in King County decided they wouldn't automatically reject "overvote" ballots where the voter had mistakenly marked the ballot for both Rossi and Gregoire. These ballots were forwarded to the canvassing board, which somehow determined that some of these ballots were intended for the Democrat.

Fund reports, "The vote changes piled up so that by December 21, Ms. Gregoire took the lead by eight votes. Democrats promptly claimed victory..Ms. Gregoire was declared the winner by 129 votes two days before Christmas. She praised the whole process as 'a model for the rest of the nation and the world at large..'" This is how democracy has been suspended in Washington state for the last four years.

This is also what Gore was trying to do in Florida. Keep demanding recounts, until Democrat party election officials in heavily Democrat counties could find, create, manufacture, or rule in enough votes for Gore to take the lead. Then the counting would be over

More here

For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH (2), TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

****************************