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More Fascist-Traitor Enemies: Corporate Media

uring Mr. George W. Bush’s first post-Inaugural visit to Ohio both he and his handlers had hoped to attract attention to his controversial educational proposals, seeking photo opportunities among school children there. In spite of its unrelenting anti-Clinton drum beat, corporate media managed to squeeze in a few such Bush-friendly moments.

Mr. Bush spoke at Sullivant Elementary. Corporate-owned news outlets focused on the non-controversial interior of the schoolroom he visited, but chose to omit the more telling drama that was transpiring directly outside the school.

There, 150 angry Buckeye protestors shouted at Mr. Bush: "Hail to the Thief!" and "Thou Shalt Not Steal!".

Although this seemingly spontaneous uprising occurred in quintessential Middle American territory, corporate-owned American media ignored the protesters. Ohio State’s college newspaper, The Lantern, however, made the anti-Bush protest its front page banner headline, including a photograph of the demonstration taking place on a wintry Columbus street.

In academic circles elsewhere, the number of law professors signing a joint statement condemning the December U.S. Supreme Court decision that reputedly made Mr. Bush president grew from 554 in mid-January to a current 673, a gain of 119 during the past month alone. Corporate media has virtually ignored this significant development as well.

See www.the-rule-of-law.com

When questioned as to why her paper had deliberately ignored the law professors’ hard-hitting statement, although it had immediately been made known to her, the assistant managing editor of Florida Today, a Gannett newspaper, replied: "Oh well, we decided to pass on that. After all, its over."

Another campus-area demonstration receiving no deserved mention in corporate media took place in Texas at Southern Methodist University where U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was greeted by an angry group of demonstrators accusing him of an unseemly political partisanship meant to spawn the current illegitimate presidency.

In January, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Willliam Rehnquist had been greeted by a similar unheralded protest in Tucson, Arizona. The protesters, who were mentioned in local media only, numbered 250.

Last Sunday, as if to renew our faith in a free press, the Philadelphia Inquirer managed to make mention of an anti-Scalia protest at Princeton University. It was gratifying to know, as the Inquirer put it: "Several dozen protesters shouted so loudly that their muffled chants could be heard during much of Scalia's 75-minute presentation."

Three GayToday feature articles about the fast-growing movement to expose Mr. Bush and his cohorts have been linked on the most popular Democratic Party activists’ Website, www.Democrats.com , including two Viewpoints by Bill Weintraub, and one by BuckcuB.

This week the corporate media pulled an Election 2000 backup stunt. The Miami Herald (Knight Ridder) and USA Today (Gannett) jointly announced that Miami-Dade, unbelievably, had voted for Bush, leaving only a 45 vote increase for Gore. Implied in this noxious report is a false premise: that Bush won Florida.

Thus, in the wake of widely-publicized but weak excuses tendered by media moguls for their having called the election mistakenly on November 7 (Gannett’s Florida Today actually printed a "Bush won" headline on November 8) it was fast becoming clear that the media moguls still had dirty work to do. They then made their phony announcements geared to make Bush appear legit.

In the meantime there will be Pittsburgh protest against Bush today—as I write—and tomorrow protesters will be on hand once again in Little Rock. Democracy in America, while on the ropes, is not down yet.

Let it not be forgotten that Gore beat Bush nationally by well over a half million votes.

The Miami-Dade recount story was given an undue amount of attention. Karl Rove, chief media manipulator strategist, intends to inundate the American people with such announcements until Americans are convinced Bush won fairly and squarely. Please.

Karl Rove’s GOP strategy swung into action immediately following the networks’ Projection that Gore had won Florida. The networks quickly reversed themselves and FOX News, where Rove’s cousin, John Ellis, works, had within hours declared Bush Florida’s winner.

The shenanigans engineered by George W.’s younger brother, Jeb—the governor of Florida—have been documented, thank goodness, at the U.S. Civil Rights Commission hearings. My old buddy, veteran activist Bob Kunst, testified at the second hearing session and his extemporaneous condemnation of the voting process remains one of the clearest and most succinct indictments of Bushit on record. His comments, and those of the Commission chair, Mary Frances Berry, were seen on C-Span nationwide. Here’s the text:

Bob Kunst: First of all, welcome to S. Florida and uh, we’re not the scapegoat for the rest of the country on what needs to be addressed today. And I’d like to paint another picture on both being a native of Miami Beach and a long time activist.

I’ve taken on Anita Bryant Jerry Falwell and 63 demonstrations recently, through my organization Oral Majority, and we are www.oralmajorityonline.com for you to use as reference with an evidence room that’s collected a great deal of data on what’s going on here.

I want to put out a perception that exists and simply, one, Gore won the state and secondly, this state was stolen by Bush and thirdly, we’ve become a scapegoat for the rest of the country that doesn’t want to act on it. As if we’re all a bunch of looney-toons, all a bunch of rip-offs. As if nobody here knows how to vote and were just an insane group of people.

Quite honestly of the 63 demonstrations, including one we’ve had right out in front of this building this morning, we get a completely different feedback from the grassroots community that is totally angry and not letting go of this issue.

So this puts another burden on you which is not to be a jury on civil rights, or are you going to be like the democratic senators that decided to cover it up or the media that decided to cover it up, when in essence we have a huge amount of evidence already of what’s going on here and you are just looking at the tip of the iceberg.

On November 7^th when we had a close election here 20 out of 67 counties did not do the mandatory required recount. That’s 1,800,000 voters in Florida that have yet to be recounted. Its not happened yet. We had a Supreme Court of course that decided to play politics, and even when they said, I suppose, a statewide standard was set in Broward County, accepted by Katherine Harris, nobody wants to talk about it.

57,000 over votes - there is already rumor to the fact that these ballots have been tampered with and double punched by individuals - 80% of those would’ve gone to Gore. The Herald has sued Duval County in order to have access to 24,000 votes. Duval doesn’t want to give up its votes because it might be subject to all kinds of tampering there.

2000 illegals have also voted in this state. I’m quoting newspaper stories here. You need to get yourself a very serious news clipping service of everything that’s come out in the state. Just because the national media is covering it up doesn’t mean it isn’t happening in this state. Lots of people know what’s going on and this is transferred around the country.

4,000 people were disqualified as felons when they were only misdemeanor people.

Katherine Harris managed to spend 4 million dollars to manage that little business.

The butterfly ballot was only one issue. Quite honestly, as a voter from Miami-Dade I am outraged that the people in Palm Beach were so concerned about having Thanksgiving dinner that they couldn’t count their ballots to even turn into Katherine Harris. That’s another 400 votes for Gore.

Here in Miami-Dade 1700 ballots were already counted that were misaligned. That means people were voting for both candidates and Gore was 316 votes ahead. To paint the picture very clearly, our Senate Democratic candidate Bill Nelson won by 28,000 votes in this state over Mr. McCollum, who was on the impeachment panel. Now if your going to tell me 537 votes separating Gore and Bush here means that all those people came out to vote for only a Senate candidate and not a Presidential candidate – if you don’t smell a rat the rest of the country does.

What we need to look at here is that 200,000 Floridians were disenfranchised and that every county is suspect and that what’s happening now is we have a bunch of media in trying to investigate the whole thing, and probably within another 3 weeks we’ll come out with a lot more outrageous things that have already happened. The Orlando Sentinel found another 203 votes for Gore in Orlando just a few days ago.

When you start adding it all up what we’re looking at is somewhere between 22,000 and 50,000 votes for Gore not for Bush, 537 votes. Which means in a sense we have an illegal, illegitimate imposter for President who has no problem going to Mexico today to tell everyone that he’s a newly elected President like Mr. Fox, and on the other hand Mr. Fox probably won legally where Bush did not in this country.

In the meantime he’s bombing Iraq as a diversion to let us know that we shouldn’t talk about any of the stuff that’s going on here any more than we should have to keep on beating Clinton to death on every single issue to make sure that we never get back to the bottom issue that the election was stolen.

The bottom line in all this is that Florida isn’t taking it anymore and that we’re not taking it anymore. And we’re going to protest and we’re going to do it all over the country. And I can tell you right now at Sunday in Daytona Beach we’ll have a banner flying over the Daytona 500 saying "Bush stole the election" with our website.

And we’ve already done it at the SuperBowl in Tampa. We’re taking it to the Kentucky Derby, the Indianapolis 500 and every single place we can including the Academy Awards. We’re not allowing this issue to die no matter what any of the politicians do, no matter what anyone else does. Were running a candidate against Jeb Bush to make sure in the Democratic primary we clean his clock and Katherine Harris and the whole gang.

What we want from this Commission is a commitment to not just be another political organization.

Mary Frances Berry: Thank you

Bob Kunst: I’d just like to end my comment, may I please? I will submit all this in writing to you. What I want to suggest to you is really very simple. The public has been had. We have 4 members of the Supreme Court; we have 13 members of Congress. Thank God for the black caucus that opened up their mouths January 6^th. We have 655 law professors around the country that signed on to say the Supreme Court went off bounds to play out this coup de etat.

The bottom line is do we have anyone we can trust and believe in any longer to take our case to the rest of the community. This is a major disaster what’s happened to our country and not to talk about it, to trivialize it and let it go on is unthinkable and unconscionable. We’ve been raped, we’ve been had, were not putting up with it anymore. Thank you.

Mary Frances Barry: I understood your testimony. I want to thank the panel and I have one quick question – I’m not sure I understood something you said. It went by me. You said something about the standard set by Katherine Harris in Broward County. Do you remember saying that?

Bob Kunst : Yes.

Mary Frances Barry: What were you talking about?

Bob Kunst: The Supreme Court, when it decided to not further count any of the votes, said we must have a statewide standard. So when they were ready to do their anointing of George W. Bush they said we needed a statewide standard in order to stop the count. The fact is the standard had already been set by Broward County.

It was the most liberal interpretation of all the chads, the dimples, the pimples, and everything else that was going on. Broward County decided to work on Thanksgiving. Broward County decided to turn in its numbers ahead of time at the proper time and Katherine Harris decided to accept it.

Mary Frances Barry: I just want to make sure I understand this point, cause it’s an important one. You’re saying that in accepting the Broward County count with the standard that they used, Katherine Harris accepted their vote, which she accepted as an appropriate standard.

Bob Kunst: Yes, yes right and it wasn’t applied to another county

Mary Frances Barry: Which means that the Supreme Court, as I understand, in Bush vs. Gore says that there was a need for a statewide standard and then Katherine Harris was the person whose in charge of the elections and ostensibly makes these decisions. Your saying is she’s already made the decision and all they had to do was incorporate her decision about Broward County.

Bob Kunst: That’s my point and they stopped the count to give the election to Bush.

Mary Frances Barry: I’ve already heard that. Thank you very much.

Bob Kunst: My pleasure.

Yup, that Bob Kunst knows how to throw neutron-bomb word-grenades, n’est pas?

There’s no mention in the February 26 Miami Herald article "Undervotes Support Bush Win" of Florida’s fraudulent "felon purge" that erased thousands of qualified black voters from the roles. There’s no talk of the 13 (out of a total of 20) Miami-Dade black precinct voting machines that were out of order on November 7.

The Herald/USA Today slant suggests that Gore wouldn’t have gained enough votes in Florida even if there had been a recount.

NOT.

The Palm Beach Post’s January 27 recount of 4,513 uncounted votes in Palm Beach gave Gore a net gain of 682 votes. Combine those with the erroneous 49 votes granted to Gore in Miami-Dade and it is clear that Katherine Harris would have had to certify a Gore victory by 194 votes! Thanks to her co-conspirators on the U.S. Supreme Court (the Florida Supreme Court had ordered a state-wide recount that was criminally halted by Bush’s buddies, including Scalia and Renquist) such a certification was quickly quashed.

Only after a recount of ALL of Florida’s counties will any presidential vote victory there be known. The Miami Herald and USA Today, obviously, and for their own corporate reasons, have obviously jumped the gun, shooting ineffectually at Bush’s critics.

I will froth angrily and speak ill of both these traitorous newspapers until the very day I die.

Oral Majority Online: www.oralmajorityonline.com

Jack Nichols is the author of The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists (Prometheus Books, 1996) Of Men’s Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity (Penguin Books, 1975) and of Welcome to Fire Island: Visions of Cherry Grove and The Pines (St. Martin’s Press, 1976)

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