Do Not Compare This Election With 2000

Anyone who thinks George W. Bush went into his presidency with any real support from either the Republicans or Democrats has misremembered the facts. We’re caught up in the awful prospect that John Kerry could either get the popular vote and lose the electoral vote, or get the electoral vote and lose the popular vote. And everyone is trying to compare the events of the 2000 election with the variable possibilities for 2004. There is no comparison. We must never forget that George W. Bush became a president on September 11, 2001, not on January 20, 2001. Without the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, George W. Bush couldn’t have managed to be even a fair-to-middlin’ Commander-in-Chief Bush did not come into his presidency as a powerful statesman ready to lead the world. He came into his presidency as a man who was put there by fraud and a biased Supreme Court. After he was declared the winner, no one wanted to follow the little wannabe into the bathroom, let alone into the rarified atmosphere of global politics. And then 9/11 occurred. The people who put the undistinguished Governor of Texas in the White House were the members of a club called The Project for the New American Century. Their statement of principles was written in 1997 by The Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and signed by 25 other movers and shakers in the Republican party. It stated that their aim was to “advance American interests in the new century”. In 2000 the group put out a report that stated that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event--like a new Pearl Harbor." They got their Pearl Harbor. And on September 12th they set about empowering the revolution they had plotted for four years. Among the 25 people who signed the PNAC Statement of Principles were Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Forbes Mag publisher Steve Forbes, former VP Dan Quayle, Middle East Policy head in the National Security Council Elliott Abrams, Cheney’s Chief of Staff I. Louis (Scooter) Libby, Department of State Undersecretary Paula J. Dobriansky, Empower America co-founder and famous moralist/gambler William J. Bennett, Vice Chair of Empower America Vin Weber and Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter W. Rodman. So let’s not hear any more twaddle comparing this election with the one in 2000. There is no comparison. The fraud in Florida set up the Supreme Court’s scandalous vote to seat the unelected George W. Bush as President of the United States, which set up the scandalous unnecessary war in Iraq hatched by the PNAC. The PNAC's preposterous scheme for the United States to take over the world has failed. And whether the BushMen win or lose this election, they have lost the thing dearest to their hearts--global supremacy. There is no big prize to be won in this election. If Bush wins again because of Republican dirty tricks at the polls or even via another moral lapse in the Supreme Court, he wins nothing but fury at home and contempt abroad. What the PNAC may be planning for an encore is anyone’s guess. But their "revolutionary change" needs to be retooled. Tomorrow the World didn’t work in 1939 either.