Page added December 18, 2000
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Mike Hagens
{Pacifica Network
News} On:
December 14, 2000
Son
Of "Thousand Points Of Light For Voluntarism"
-A Few Other Points -
. . . Imagine an election in the 3rd world . . .
1. Where. . . The self-declared winner was the son of a former president or prime minister,
and the former president was himself the former head of the nation's secret police,
such as the CIA.
2. Where. . . The self-declared winner lost the popular vote,
but won based on some old colonial hold-over, like the electoral college,
from the nation's pre-democracy past.
3. Where. . . The self-declared winner's victory turned on disputed ballots,
cast in a state governed by his brother.
4. Where. . . The poorly drafted ballots of one district,
a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent,
lead thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.
5. Imagine. . . The nation's most despised cast, feared for their livelihoods and their lives,
turn out in record numbers to vote in near universal opposition
to the self-declared winner's candidacy.
6. Imagine. . . That hundreds of members of that most despised cast
were intercepted on their way to the poles by the state police,
operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother.
7. Imagine. . . That six-million people voted in the disputed state and
the self-declared winner's lead was only 327 votes,
fewer certainly than the vote counting machines margin of error.
8. Imagine. . . That the self-declared winner and his political party oppose
a more careful by-hand inspection and recount of the ballots in the disputed state,
or the most hotly disputed district.
9. Imagine. . . That the self-declared winner - himself a governor of a major state,
had the worst human rights record of any state in this nation,
and actually lead the country in executions.
10. Imagine. . . That a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner
was to appoint like-minded human rights violators,
to life-time positions on the high-court of that nation.
Now, none of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything other
than self-declared winner's will-to-power, but I think all of us would wearily turn the
newspaper page thinking, that this was another sad tale of pitiful pre or anti-democracy
peoples in some strange country far off. But it isn't.
Food for thought. Mike Hagens -
Pacifica
Network News.
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