Announce Events Send Out Your News Sell Your Books Advertise With Us   NGOs, U.N. MISSIONS: "Get Your Message Out"

Ian Williams is a journalist and U.N. Correspondent for The Nation and a weekly columnist for www.MaximsNews.com.   Order his great book from Amazon.com, Deserter: George Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past.   Ian Williams is the past president of the United Nations Correspondents Association.  See his Bio.  See his columns listed below.   IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com 

Order Now from Amazon.com       http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560256273/wwwmaximsnewc-20/103-2632401-6943852?creative=125577&camp=2321&link_code=as1

           UNITED NATIONS -- 28 October 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com /  Faced with a visibly intellectually-challenged incumbent who has run up the biggest deficit in history, and who is running a disastrous foreign war based on what are now admitted falsehoods, John Kerry should win by a landslide but it is still too close to call, even discounting the paranoid thought that George W. Bush may suddenly produce Osama Bin Laden from his hat on Halloween. 

Some of this is a self-inflicted wound. 

Kerry, like most American politicians, has spent so much time pandering to the lobbyists and special interest groups who pay for elections that the accusations of flip-flopping have some truth. 

Bill Clinton called it triangulation, but the Arkansas wonder had a tremendous charisma that allowed him to leave office as the most popular president in recent history.

Indeed, one reason for hope for Kerry is that Bill Clinton is back up from his heart surgery and resumes campaigning this week, which in such a close race should help close the yawning charisma gap.

Ironically, Bush’s constant abuse of Kerry as a “Liberal” during the recent debates may help the Democrat, since many voters who need motivating think that the Senator is far too conservative!  

Certainly many liberals  may well wonder why they will bother to vote for someone who forswears signing the Kyoto Protocols, promises that he won’t be “giving a veto to the UN” and who along with John Edwards strongly hints  that Bush really fluffed it because he went after Iraq, instead of Iran.

Indeed, speaking at a Rally at the British Labour Party conference a few weeks ago, I had to remind them that, despite their ire at Blair for chumming up to Bush, the Democratic contender’s stated positions on most items of US policy make British Tory leader Howard and Italian Premier Berlusconi look like raging leftists.

Even so, any Americans in full possession of their marbles have to be supporting Kerry –:Bush, is far worse, and a real threat to the US and to the world.

One of those threats is to democracy – which even at the best of times is not as the rest of the world knows it in the USA, which still has an essentially 18^th century polity. 

Compared with Europe, being on the electoral rolls in the USA often takes a lot of effort, and the Southern Democrats in the past, and the Republicans who have spiritually inherited their Ku Klux Klan robes, have centuries of experience in keeping unreliable voters off the rolls.

It is true that the fossilized American two party system is undemocratic. 

But when Naderites ask us to help break it, we should not do it this year when it shows ominous signs of breaking into a one party system.

Republicans speak openly about vote suppression. 

The Ohio Republican Party has just enlisted 3,600 volunteers whose job is essentially to challenge the right to vote of many Democratic voters – and to scare off many others. 

Another Republican state official has rejected voter registration forms that came in on insufficiently heavy paper. 

In Florida, one of Jeb Bush’s hirelings has rejected registration forms where the would-be voters signed declarations that they were citizens – but did not tick a box saying the same thing.

In Florida, notoriously, thousands of black voters who have the same names as felons elsewhere in the country have been dropped, yet again, from the voting register, but the same mistake was not made for Hispanic votes. 

It is not of course because Cuban Americans are especially law-abiding – on the contrary -but they have traditionally supported Republicans.

Today, it is reported that 60,000 blank absentee ballots in Broward County, Florida seem to be lost in the mail.

Some states are accepting faxed absentee ballots from the military, negating the struggle for secret ballots that is the foundation of democracy.

In the old days, the Supreme Court took an interest in such vote suppression tactics, but that was a different Court – not the one that stopped the recount in Florida and declared Bush the winner four years ago.

Indeed, that is one of the major reasons why democratic (with a small “d”) Americans should want a Kerry victory. 

The Supreme Court already has a Republican inclined majority, and Bush, if "re-elected", would almost certainly appoint sufficient conservatives to consolidate that hold for decades. 

He already has to all the lower positions, where finding a recently appointed Federal Judge who supports Roe v. Wade is as likely as finding an overt Trotskyist on Stalin’s Central Committee.

 A consolidated right wing Supreme Court Bench could, and almost certainly would, frustrate any future Democratic attempts to legislate out of the genuine social, economic and military crises that George W. Bush has dragged the country into. 

It would certainly back gerrymandering exercises like the recent one in Texas that wrote off the map five Democratic Congressional Districts.

With such stark issues confronting the country, one has to ask white, working class voters behave like Turkeys voting for Christmas and support Bush and the Republicans?

The answers were revealed last week in a poll conducted by the University of Maryland. 

The majority of Bush supporters actually still think that Saddam Hussein was behind September 11, and three quarters of them think that Iraq was providing substantial support for Al-Qaeda. 

Weeks after the official Duelfer report that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, 72% of them think that it did. 

Indeed 57% thought that the Report actually said so.

Interestingly, a majority of the Bush supporters also said that they would not have supported the War if there were no WMDs. 

Most Bush supporters obviously listen to Tony Blair as well – they think the rest of the world wants Bush re-elected.

On more domestic issues, most Bush voters think that he supports the International Criminal Court, and three quarters actually assume that he favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements. 

In short – most Bush supporters support Kerry’s policies, not Bush’s!  

Indeed they may even be to the left of Kerry!

The corollary to that is that Kerry has not been getting his message out clearly. 

And in fact, he has hedged far too much. 

But it also speaks to the nature of political discourse in the country.

Most Americans get their news from TV and radio. 

Since deregulation of the media, and the consolidation of media ownership, there has been far less of it – and what there is has an unashamed rightward slant.  

Even Republican legislators recently turned back an attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to remove some the last bars on cross holdings of print and broadcast media. 

That would probably be successful in a second term.

Add to that the role of money in politics, which reduces political discourse to brain-numbing and slanderous but highly expensive sound-bite ads backed by “fair and balanced” bigoted big mouths masquerading as journalists, and you almost have to admire Americans for not returning majorities of Kim Jong Il proportions to the incumbent.

But it seems that on November 2, we may have to hope that the Democrats can hire better lawyers and rent-a-mobs than the Republicans. 

Let’s hope that Kerry gets elected – so we can start holding his feet to the fire. 

At least he will feel it – his opponent obviously does not notice when his pants are in conflagration.

               Email Ian Williams:  IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com

  Order Here!!! 

Deserter: George Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past  

by Ian Williams

Order Now from Amazon.com       http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560256273/wwwmaximsnewc-20/103-2632401-6943852?creative=125577&camp=2321&link_code=as1

Ian Williams' Weekly Columns in MaximsNews.com

KIM JONG IL Wants a Vote for the Incumbent Too!  28 October 2004

President Bush and the Three Little Pigs... 13 October 2004

When Hypocrisy Can Kill...  7 October 2004

Bush  - Still A Deserter Safire, still wrong...  15 September 2004

Bushowulf – the Saga   10 September 2004

Why Lebanon?...  9 September 2004

Ian Williams Welcomes Republicans to New York...  29 August 2004

What kind of Veteran?  Calley-type or Kerry-type?  25 August 2004

Chavez Beating about the Bush...  18 August 2004

The War Records of Bush and Kerry...  12 August 2004

Where is Osama Bin Laden?  6 August 2004

Sudan, To Intervene – or not to Intervene?  27 July 2004

Mr. Sharon, Tear Down This Wall!  16 July 2004

William Safire – Warped, on Speed, or Just Running Mad Again?  13 July 2004

Bosnian U.N. Defender Locked Up  7 July 2004

The U.N., the U.S. & the I.C.C.  30 June 2004

The New York Times, William Safire and the United Nations  23 June 2004

Hastily Contrived, Verbose, and Fudged: Security Council Resolution 1546  16 June 2004

Is the U.S. Clever Enough to Rule the World?  9 June 2004

Humor the Beast: the U.S. and the ICC  2 June 2004

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?  20 May 2004

The Solution to the Iraqi Knot  12 May 2004     

For more information about MaximsNews.com/Books, please see, www.maximsnews.com/bookpromotions.htm   or contact, DrMaxStamper@MaximsNews.com.

Please CONFIRM your free Subscription to MaximsNews.com: See the Bottom of this Page.*  

Please let us show you how we can announce events, send out your news and sell your books to over 10,000 at the United Nations and the International Community.

Max Stamper, Ph.D.,  London School of Economics, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, MaximsNews.com

DrMaxStamper@MaximsNews.com  (+) 1 (201) 848-6162.

Home   About Max Stamper   Key Clients   International Affairs    Media Tools  

      www.MaximsNews.com, News Network for the United Nations and the International Community: 

Diplomats,  donors,  key United Nations Officials,  U.N. activists,  all Missions to the U.N.,  all NGOs,  journalists,  activists in human rights,  women's rights,  African-American rights,  peace,  the environment,  development and poverty,  public policy experts,  political figures,  and academics.  

    MaximsNews.com, News Network Reaching Over 10,000 in the International Community, now in association with MediaChannel.org and Globalvision News Network, global news and media information services with more than 300 news affiliates in 135 countries. 

     Syndicated globally by RSS and XML feeds, GOOGLE NEWS,  broadcast email, Blogs,  streaming video, Internet and news wire services.  For Free Subscription, RSS, or XML feeds to your website, contact: MaximsNews@MaximsNews.com

  Max Stamper is eager to explore your international public affairs and communication needs, and to discuss our services.  DrMaxStamper@MaximsNews.com  phone: (+) 1 (201) 848-6162. 

Suite 112, 76 North Maple Ave. , Ridgewood, NJ  07450 U.S.A.