USA elections are rigged, it is certain

Part I: The Elephant in the Polling Booth

By Mark Crispin Miller

The Washington Spectator

Sunday 01 October 2006

To say that this election could go either way is not to say that the
Republicans have any chance of winning it. As a civic entity responsive to
the voters' will, the party's over, there being no American majority that
backs it, or that ever would. Bush has left the GOP in much the same
condition as Iraq, Afghanistan, the global climate, New Orleans, the Bill
of Rights, our military, our economy and our national reputation. Thus the
regime is reviled as hotly by conservatives as by liberals, nor do any
moderates support it.

So slight is Bush's popularity that his own party's candidates for
Congress are afraid to speak his name or to be seen with him (although
their numbers, in the aggregate, are even lower than his). It seems the
only citizens who still have any faith in him are those who think God
wants us to burn witches and drive SUVs. For all their zeal, such
theocratic types are not in the majority, not even close, and thus there's
no chance that the GOP can get the necessary votes.

And so the Democrats are feeling good, and calling for a giant drive
to get the vote out on Election Day. Such an effort is essential - and not
just to the Democrats but to the very survival of this foundering
Republic. However, such a drive will do the Democrats, and all the rest of
us, more harm than good if it fails to note a certain fact about our
current situation: i.e., that the Democrats are going to lose the contest
in November, even though the people will (again) be voting for them. The
Bush Republicans are likely to remain in power despite the fact that only
a minority will vote to have them there. That, at any rate, is what will
happen if we don't start working to pre-empt it now.

Even though this election could go either way, neither way will
benefit the Democrats. Either the Republicans will steal their
"re-election" on Election Day, just as they did two years ago, or they
will slime their way to "victory" through force and fraud and strident
propaganda, as they did after Election Day 2000. Whichever strategy they
use, the only way to stop it is to face it, and then shout so long and
loud about it that the people finally perceive, at last, that their
suspicions are entirely just - and, this time, just say no.

An Inconvenient Truth - That Bush/Cheney stole their "re-election" is
not a "theory" but a fact that has by now been proved beyond the shadow of
a doubt. The case was made, first, by the House Judiciary Committee - or
rather by its Democratic members, who conducted a meticulous inquiry into
the debacle in Ohio. (The Republicans boycotted the investigation, and
obstructed it.) Its findings were released on January 5, 2005, in the
so-called Conyers Report, after Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), the committee's
ranking Democrat. The Republicans attacked it, and the press and leading
Democrats ignored it; yet that report was sound, its major findings wholly
accurate.

In July of that year the Democratic National Committee came out with
its own study of Ohio, which offers still more evidence of fraud - before
concluding, weirdly, that there was no fraud but rather much
"incompetence" (all of which somehow helped only the GOP). Despite its
stated contradiction of the House report, the DNC analysts disprove not
one of Conyers's findings.

A few months later, the House report was bolstered by a thick volume
of evidence compiled by the investigators who had helped the Democrats
conduct their research in Ohio: Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman and Steve
Rosenfeld. Their book How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election and Is
Rigging 2008 reconfirms the House report with rich documentation, and
evidences further fraud as well. Although the book went largely
unreviewed, its findings proved unassailable; as did my essay in the
August 2005 issue of Harper's, "None Dare Call It Stolen" (this was the
first time any major medium addressed the issue).

While such works dealt only with Ohio in 2004, others soon appeared,
demonstrating that Team Bush, that year, defrauded the electorate
nationwide. My book Fooled Again documented the ultra-rightist crime wave
that undid countless votes not only in Ohio but in Florida, Pennsylvania,
Oregon, New York, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Minnesota, Michigan,
Wisconsin, South Dakota, Iowa, New Jersey, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana,
Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and the Carolinas. It also detailed the
interference of Bush/Cheney with the votes of millions of Americans abroad.

Despite a national media blackoutno reviews in any major U.S. dailies
or newsmagazines, no interviews on network TV or radio, or on NPR or
PBSFooled Again eventually found a large readership through the Internet,
C-SPAN, Air America, and broad local radio coverage.

This past June, the case against the Bush regime was expanded by
three major works. Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss's Was the 2004 Election
Stolen? devastates the fiction that the exit polls conducted on Election
Day were wrong. Despite Freeman's scrupulous research, that book too went
unreviewed. Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse dissects the huge fraud(s)
whereby the Bush/Cheney ticket "won" New Mexico despite the strongly
Democratic inclination of the state's Hispanic voters, who turned out in
record numbers to dump Bush. (Somehow, over 17,000 of them cast no vote
for president, according to the e-voting machines deployed in Democratic
precincts.)

More noticeably, Rolling Stone ran Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s,
comprehensive study of Ohio, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"a piece the
media could not ignore because its author was too famous. Thus Kennedy
appeared on some shows that had been closed to all us other analysts,
although his piece relied explicitly on our research; and even he was
treated like a fantasist, or a felon, by the likes of Neil Cavuto, Tucker
Carlson, Wolf Blitzer and Charlie Rose. Aside from those interrogations
(and a decent head-to-head with Stephen Colbert, who let him finish
several sentences), Kennedy too was disrespected by the media, which
either blacked him out or put him down.

In short, the awful truth about 2004 has been denied by right and
left alikeand, strange to say, more loudly on the left. Indeed, whereas
the right has largely chosen to avoid the issue, the only journalists who
have purported to "debunk" the "theory" of Bush and Cheney's stolen
re-election have been liberals and progressive (and, ordinarily, excellent
reporters): Mark Hertsgaard at Mother Jones; Russ Baker at TomPaine.com;
David Corn at The Nation; and, above all, Farhad Manjoo at Salon.

Their "refutations" of the case are largely based on the mere
exculpatory say-so of a few unconscious (or complicit) Democrats. And yet,
although the work of these debunkers has itself been thoroughly debunked
(and Manjoo, therefore, quietly assigned to other topics), it has done
much to propagate the myth that there's "no evidence" that Bush & Co.
subverted our democracy. Such denials have been persuasive not because
they are well argued but because the truth is terrifying, and a lot of
people (including those reporters) very badly need a reason to believe
that all is well. Such wishful thinking has kept "the liberal media" from
dealing with the direst threat that our democracy has ever faced.

And yet most of our fellow citizens sense that threat. A Zogby poll
in August found that only 45 percent of the American people felt "very
confident" that Bush was re-elected "fair and square," while the rest
either doubted it or were "not at all confident" about it. The numbers of
the blithe have been decreasing as the people have learned more and more
about BushCo's fascistic antics in 2004 - and, as well, about the fatal
flaws in the e-voting systems that the Republicans have been aggressively
promoting since 2000. (Some Democrats have abetted them.)

The flaws of such systems have been exposed repeatedly by activists
like Bev Harris, Brad Friedman, Clint Curtis, Lynn Landes, Earl Katz and
Bruce O'Dell, and have also been solemnly detailed in many academic
studiesfrom, among others, NYU's Brennan Center for Justice; Princeton's
Center for IT Policy; RABA Technologies; SAIC (Science Applications
International Corporation); the U.S. Government Accountability Office; and
a cohort of computer scientists at Johns Hopkins, Rice and Stanford
universities. (See previous issues of the Washington Spectator, here and
here.)

Read together, all those exposés and studies tell of a close and
wholly illegitimate relationship between the corporate vendors of those
voting systems and Bush/Cheney's GOP. Three of the four firms that sell
those systemsDiebold, ES&S and Hart InterCivichave tight links with the
party. The fourth, Sequoia, has also tended to malfunction in
Bush/Cheney's favor.

Now we have strong evidence of a covert partnership between those
interests that "count" some four-fifths of U.S. votes and the party that
controls our government. In a follow-up piece for Rolling Stone, Robert F.
Kennedy, Jr., quotes the shocking testimony of a Diebold whistle-blower
who, along with other employees, took part in the surreptitious placement
of a software "patch" in the company's machines in Georgia (whose
electoral system had, just weeks before, been privatized through a secret
contract with the Secretary of State). The order came directly from Bob
Urosevich, president of Diebold's e-voting machine division. "We were told
not to talk to county personnel about it," says Chris Hood, a consultant
to the company. And what about that patch? "We were told that it was
intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do," Hood noted.
"The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done."

All this happened one sticky day in August 2002. On Election Day,
some ten weeks later, the official outcome of the vote baffled everyone:
Senator Max Cleland, a Democrat whom polls showed had been leading his
opponent, Saxby Chambliss, by five points, lost by seven points. In the
race for governor, Democrat Roy Barnes, who had been leading Republican
Sonny Perdue by eleven points, lost by five. Both losses were
inexplicable, and Cleland's was especially poignant. A war veteran and
triple amputee, Cleland was quite popular in Georgia, whereas Chambliss
was unknown - and a chickenhawk to boot, a "bad knee" having kept him out
of Vietnam. Chambliss's attack ads had cast Cleland as a traitor, because
he had voted against establishing the Department of Homeland Security. And
now the people of the Peach State had apparently been swayed by their fear
of terrorism into believing that those ads were right.

That year there were other such anomalies, induced, perhaps, by what
some wags called "Diebold magic," as the company's product figured heavily
in those other states where far-right candidates won upset victories:
Colorado, where Republican Wayne Allard, down by nine points against
Democrat Tom Strickland, won by five points; and New Hampshire, where
Republican John Sununu, down by one point against Democrat Jeanne Shaheen,
won by four points.

As odd as such reversals seemed, and as conspicuous a role as Diebold
evidently played in them, there were no calls for inquiry, as it was
easier to say that "terrorism" - or maybe "family values" - had simply
grabbed the voters' hearts and minds in Georgia, Colorado and New
Hampshire. (Diebold, in fact, had no hand in Republican Norm Coleman's
startling victory over Walter Mondale in Minnesota - the born-again New
Jerseyite having trailed the favorite son by five points, then winning
suddenly by three.) Thus did the Bush Republicans take back the Senate,
thereby canceling out the Democratic edge enabled briefly by Jim
Jeffords's controversial exit from the GOP.

Saving Our Democracy - We must delve into the recent past, not to
quibble over ancient numbers but to find out where we really are today.
For what happened in some states four years ago, and in most states two
years ago, is still happening now, and in more states than ever: a vast,
complex and incremental process of mass disenfranchisement - which is, in
fact, the only way the Bush Republicans could ever get "elected," as their
program is not conservative but radical, irrational, apocalyptic: i.e.,
unacceptable to most Americans, liberals and true conservatives alike.

This is why they've gerrymandered Texas and (less visibly) Virginia -
and also why they've packed the Supreme Court with comrades disinclined to
outlaw gerrymandering (unless it's Democrats who try it). This is why they
are dead-set against repealing state laws disenfranchising ex-felons - and
also why they've used the "war on drugs" to jail as many likely Democrats
as possible. (This would also help explain the post-Katrina diaspora, and
especially the out-of-state internment of over 70,000 Louisianans.) And
this is why the Bush Republicans push e-voting machines in every state,
and program them to flip votes cast by Democrats into votes "cast" for
Republicans, and systematically provide too few machines to Democratic
precincts, and keep on arbitrarily removing Democrats from voter rolls,
and "challenge" would-be voters at the polls, and simply throw out
countless ballots of all kinds, and spread disinformation on Election Day.
These are just some of the devices that were used not only in Ohio to
ensure Bush/Cheney's "re-election," but in every state where they could
pull it off - on both coasts, in the Midwest, and throughout the South.

In the next issue of the Spectator, I'll elaborate on the GOP's two
likeliest moves in November's mid-term elections. For now, we must do all
we can to make everyone aware of what's been going down - and, most
important, what is now at stake. As the press and the Democrats have
failed to call for any actual reform of the election system, Bush and Co.
are now in a superb position to retain their legislative power, regardless
of how people vote (or try to vote).

We need a massive turnout in November - but not because it will put
Democrats in power. We need the biggest turnout ever, as a protest on
behalf of free and fair elections in America. Such a turnout will make it
that much harder for the Bush Republicans to spin their victory as
legitimate. (This is why the GOP in several states, including Maryland and
Colorado, is urging people to vote absentee next month: to make the
opposition appear that much smaller.) But more important, such a turnout
will prepare people for the crucial fight to come - the effort to save our
democracy.

If we get millions out to vote, without informing them they may well
"lose" anyway, the blow will devastate them, just as Kerry's abrupt
concession did in 2004. It took two years to get Americans mobilized
again. If Bush and his allies steal the next election, we won't have years
to start resisting. The resistance must start on Day One, just as in
Ukraine and Mexico; and so the people must be ready for the fight - and so
they need to know enough to wage it, and to win it.

Part II: Our Rigged Elections

Monday 15 October 2006

The GOP Playbook: How to steal the vote.

From the start, George W. Bush has pointedly refused to ask that we
make any national sacrifice to help us win the "war on terror." Soon after
9/11 he urged us not to curb our appetites in any way, although to do so
would have made much sense, and makes sense now. After all, it's oil, in
part, that U.S. troops are fighting for, and oil that indirectly pays for
all the guns and bombs now blowing those troops, and countless others, to
shreds. The patriotic thing would therefore be to lessen our national
dependency on fossil fuels, by driving less (or not at all), and turning
off the air conditioners, by buying fewer disposables, and otherwise
deferring to the greater good. Bush, however, will have none of that,
asserting that the best thing we can do to help win this war is just go
shopping.

Yet in one respect it's not exactly right to say that our president
has asked nothing of us. Since 9/11, Bush has made astonishing demands on
all his fellow citizens, asking us to swallow more baloney than the U.S.
government has ever fed the people of this country. He and his team have
asked us to believe that 9/11 came as a complete surprise, that Saddam
Hussein was part of it, and that Iraq would soon be lobbing atom bombs,
poison gas, and lethal pathogens at Tel Aviv and Disney World. They also
asked us to believe that the Iraqi people would bestrew our troops with
flowers, then that the "mission" had been "accomplished," then that those
friendly natives had been overrun by "foreign terrorists" intent on
wrecking the "democracy" that we were there to build. And now Bush asks us
to believe that things aren't half as bad in Iraq (not to mention
Afghanistan), as they appear, and that his team can win this war.

That most Americans do not believe a word of it, and therefore will
not vote Republican, attests to the diffusive power of truth, which in
this country still resonates despite the efforts of both government and
media to bury it. Bush's big lies have prevailed not just because his
regime has so doggedly promoted them. For too long, those howlers also had
the benefit of a compliant press that simply echoed them.

But the truth about Iraq could not be spun away as more and more
Americans encountered it, traumatically, in their own lives, and as the
word spread ever further through the Internet and other unofficial
channels - an arduous process of enlightenment that the press has only
recently begun to help along. (The Democrats have mostly sat there mute.)
And so the White House's claims about Iraq - and about 9/11, Afghanistan,
Katrina, the economy, the public schools, the global climate and the GOP's
respect for "family values" - strike millions of Americans as utter hooey.

Terrorism and Turnout - Of all the crackpot views pervading BushCo's
faith-based universe, there's one that still pervades the real world, too:
the myth of the two T's. "Terrorism and turnout," as the New York Times
puts it, "were the 'two t's' that have been credited with GOP dominance in
the last three [sic] elections." And as they'd swept BushCo to victory
twice before, so will the two T's shortly benefit the GOP again - or so
Karl Rove allegedly believes.

This year, AP reported recently, "the White House will reprise the
two T's of its successful campaign strategy since 2002: terrorism and
turnout." In other words, the Bush Republicans expect to win again through
(a) fear itself, aroused by the eternal aftershock of 9/11; and (b) by
mobilizing the expansive legions of their Christianist supporters.

That sounds plausible - until you think about it. There's no evidence
that either terrorism or the Christian right decided the 2004 election. A
Pew poll published on November 11 of that year found that the terror
threat had driven only 9 percent of the electorate. There were no sudden
multitudes of "NASCAR dads" and "security moms" supporting Bush in 2004 -
and there was no electoral tsunami of right-wing evangelism either.

For all the big talk by the leaders of the Christian right, Bush was
not re-elected by the faithful, as there were nowhere near enough of them
to pull it off. Nationwide, there were 4 million evangelicals who hadn't
voted for Bush/Cheney in 2000, and Karl Rove wooed them. Even if he got
them all, however, that triumph would not explain the miracle of Bush's
picking up 11 million more votes than he'd allegedly won against Al Gore.
This insufficiency is clearer still when we recall the incumbent's record
disapproval ratings. Hovering in the high mid-40s, Bush's negatives were
worse than Lyndon Johnson's in 1968 and Jimmy Carter's in 1980. On the
other hand, Democrats were extraordinarily united. At registering new
voters, they trounced the GOP by as much as 5 to 1 in big swing states. By
contrast, Bush's party was divided, with many eminent Republicans, both
moderates and hardcore conservatives, either coming out for Kerry or for
neither one.

Bush's evangelical advantage was further diminished by the heavy
national turnout on Election Day: 60.7 percent, the highest in thirty-six
years (and it was no doubt even higher, as there were thousands of reports
of Democrats who couldn't vote because their names had somehow vanished
from the rolls). High turnout tends to favor Democrats. In any case, the
Christianists' peculiar brand of "moral values" drove few voters to the
polls: Pew found that only 3 percent had been incited by the specter of
gay marriage, while only 9 percent named "moral values" as their main
concern.

A Credible Pretext - In short, Bush/Cheney was not swept to
re-election by a national surge of theocratic zeal. And yet Bush's most
fanatical supporters were essential to his "victory," which they enabled
by providing a persuasive-sounding rationale for it. Because there was,
and is, no reasonable explanation for that win, it was efficiently
explained away as having been effected by the non-existent multitude of
True Believers. Providentially, their votes came pouring forth late on
Election Day, especially in Ohio - a propaganda line without a shred of
evidence to back it up. (The late-day turnout in Ohio's rural districts
was, in fact, quite light.) And yet that notion soon became gospel, as the
media, and the Democrats, mechanically echoed the mere say-so of the Bush
team and the Christianists themselves.

For the subversion of democracy, some such convincing rationale is
just as crucial as computers, ballot "spoilage," Jim Crow laws and party
goons - and the regime now needs a sturdy pretext more than ever, as the
Republicans have reached new lows in popular esteem. Thus the two T's are
now all-important; and, to complicate Karl Rove's project even further,
only one of them remains as feasible as both appeared to be in 2004. Since
then Bush's Christian-right support has been eroded by the war and the
economy, BushCo's accommodationist stance on immigration, the party's
failure to stamp out abortion, same-sex marriage and "obscenity," and, not
least, the low farce of Foleygate.

"Terrorism" is now the one and only argument whereby the ravaged GOP
might arguably validate their next amazing win. This explains why Rove has
had the White House stick so closely to the "terrorism" script, even
though the White House has itself conceded that this script is not so
credible: Bush admits that there's no evidence of links between Al Qaeda,
9/11 and Saddam Hussein - and yet he continues yawping at the links
between them, most startlingly in his anniversary speech a few weeks ago
on September 11.

That oration kindled broad astonishment at the psychotic fixity of
its key thesis: i.e., that U.S. troops are in Iraq to halt the spread of
global terror (and not themselves a major stimulus thereto, as Bush's own
intel establishment has bluntly noted). That line has been disdained not
only by the media but also by the GOP's top pundits and Congressional
candidates, more and more of whom, the New York Times reported on
September 3, "are disregarding Mr. Rove's advice."

That Rove won't give it up attests to its essential function as
pre-propaganda: Bush et al. shout of "terrorism" not because they think it
will win votes. They don't care whether people vote for them or not.
Rather, they've been hammering at "terrorism" in the hope that it will fly
as a convincing reason why the GOP retained its grip on Congress, even
though the party has no mass support. The strategy reflects, in part, on
the immense credulity (and, to some extent, complicity) of the political
establishment, which cannot, will not, does not want to see that this
regime has never even been elected.

Such terror-obsessed pre-propaganda also tragically portends an
imminent "surprise" deployed, before Election Day, to make Bush's empty,
crazy argument seem suddenly believable. Whether it's a second 9/11, or a
huge "defensive" strike against Iran, or a paralyzing combination of the
two, a move like that would serve to make the recent Bush/Cheney line on
"terror" sound prophetic rather than insane.

"Counting" the Vote - However they may seek to validate the electoral
fraud, the Bush bunch are now in a superb position to effect it. First of
all, computerized voting and vote-counting are today far more extensive
than they were two years ago, thanks to the relentless efforts of the GOP,
the e-voting manufacturers and not a few compliant Democrats.

Although some victories have been won for democratic practice through
tireless bipartisan citizen activism, most notably in Colorado, North
Carolina and New Mexico, such grassroots triumphs have been overshadowed
by the juggernaut's immense success at reddening blue America. In 2004, 23
percent of the electorate cast their votes on "direct-recording
electronic" (DRE) machines. Today, according to Election Data Services,
it's over 39 percent. And nearly 41 percent will have their votes counted
by computerized scanners - a method preferable to using DRE machines, as
it allows for paper ballots, but a risky practice nonetheless. Thus over
80 percent of next month's vote will be counted secretly, by private
vendors closely tied to Bush's party.

The GOP has also furthered mass disenfranchisement by passing Jim
Crow laws of startling brazenness (yet that have gone largely unnoticed by
the press). The Ohio legislature has passed a law that quadruples the
price of recounts, makes machine audits near-impossible, hinders
registration of new voters, tightens partisan control of the election
work-force and requires all voters to bring IDs to the polls. Photo IDs,
effectively a poll tax, are now required in Indiana and Florida - where,
moreover, it is now illegal to hand-count paper ballots once they have
been "counted" by machine. Through such laws - and epidemic lawlessness -
the party will control the vote throughout the nation on November 7.

Brazen Behavior - While the party has pre-empted innumerable votes
below the radar, it has also shown a steely willingness to thwart the
voters openly, if they should dare resist the party's will. Take, for
example, last summer's special race in San Diego to fill the empty seat of
the felonious Randy Cunningham, a former Republican congressman who is now
doing time for accepting bribes. Although leading in the pre-election
polls, the Democrat, Francine Busby, lost to Brian Bilbray of the GOP; and
then it came out that the party's poll workers had been ordered to take
the e-voting machinery home with them for several days before the vote.

At the news of this jaw-dropping wrong (it being a very simple task
to fiddle with the gadgets' memory cards and thereby fix the final count),
San Diegans called for an investigation and a new election. A week after
the election - and seventeen days before the vote was even certified -
Bilbray flew to Washington, where he was summarily sworn in by House
Speaker Dennis Hastert. In late August that amazing move was, still more
amazingly, approved by Superior Court Judge Yuri Hofmann, who argued that
the state of California had no jurisdiction once the Speaker of the House
had made the people's choice.

If Dennis Hastert can choose Brian Bilbray for that seat,
irrespective of the will of the electorate, why bother having House
elections anywhere? Indeed, why bother with elections? Why not just have
Congress's membership decided by the Speaker of the House - or by
President Bush himself? Maybe that imperial arrangement would amuse the
press as much as it appeals to Bush & Co. Otherwise there might have been
some coverage of the scandal by the news media, which has largely
disregarded it (while Hastert's role in Foleygate is a huge story).

Eleventh-Hour Plan - Such journalistic silence makes it all the
likelier that the Republicans will get away with it again - although it's
also possible, of course, that they will somehow fail to steal it on
Election Day. Chance, accident, imperial over-reaching and/or popular
resistance can thwart the best-laid plans. If that should happen, though,
the party has a plan to fix the problem; and the press's eerie silence on
the danger of election fraud could help that strategy succeed.

If the GOP should lose the House or Senate, its troops will mount a
noisy propaganda drive accusing their opponents of election fraud. This is
no mere speculation, according to a well-placed party operative who lately
told talk radio host Thom Hartmann, off the record, that the game will be
to shriek indignantly that those dark-hearted Democrats have fixed the
race. We will hear endlessly of Democratic "voter fraud" through phantom
ballots, rigged machines, intimidation tactics, and all the other tricks
whereby the Bush regime has come to power. The regime will, in short,
deploy the ultimate Swift Boat maneuver to turn around as many races as
they need so as to nullify the will of the electorate.

Of course, the Democrats themselves have a rich history of election
fraud, but there's no evidence of much, if any, since Bush came upon the
scene; and yet with very few exceptions, they have doggedly refused to
speak about the growing danger of such fraud, so that the GOP - the very
perpetrators of that fraud - will be the first to make an issue of it. The
press too has ignored the issue, other than to bleat, from time to time,
that such malfeasance has been common "on both sides." Thus this besieged
democracy appears now to have no defenders but ourselves. But we can do
that vital work if we will only face what's happening and spread the word,
and stand united not as party members, or as liberals, moderates and
conservatives, but as Americans.

Mark Crispin Miller has authored many books, including Cruel and
Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order and The Bush Dyslexicon, and is a
professor of culture and communication at New York University.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/101906O.shtml