 |
 |
| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| What Moral Values? By Antonio C. Abaya Written Nov. 9, 2004 For the Manila Standard November 11 issue In the aftermath of George W. Bush�s convincing re-election to the presidency last Nov. 02, there has been a flurry of commentary in media, to the effect that moral values had carried the day for President Bush. Two days after E-Day, the Philippine Daily Inquirer�s banner headline was MORAL VALUES WON THE VOTE. But the text, from the New York Times and wire services was less definitive (and more accurate): �A perceived sense of morality and traditional values helped propel (emphasis mine) President George W. Bush to a decisive victory in the US elections in a time of war and economic hardship, White House aides and political analysts said yesterday�..� My own take, in my article �Osama Spooked the US� (Nov. 03) was that, with his sudden and totally unexpected appearance in tens of millions of American living rooms four days before E-Day, Osama bin Laden, not �moral values,� was the biggest single factor in the decision of the undecided 4% of the voters to go mostly for Bush in the last few days. And no less than President Bush�s master strategist, Karl Rove � my favorite candidate for the honorific �Joseph Goebbels of the 21st Century,� truly the Brains of the Brainless Wonder � seems to have reached a similar conclusion. Interviewed on NBC�s Meet the Press on Nov.03 (Nov. 04, Manila time), Rove �played down the importance of �moral values,� which exit polls last Tuesday unexpectedly identified as a major consideration of many voters, especially those who voted for Bush. �Rove said 34% of the voters were motivated by issues surrounding Iraq and the war on terror, compared with 30% motivated by moral values. �What essentially happened in this election was that people became concerned about three issues: first the war, then the economy, jobs and taxes, and then moral values. And then everything else dropped off the plate,� he said�.� (Associated Press in Yahoo News.) Note that in Rove�s numbers, the 4% difference matched the 4% of American voters who were still undecided in the dead-heat polls a few days before E-Day, when Osama bin Laden suddenly appeared in their living rooms. Rove�s 4% also accounts for the 3.5% final winning margin of Bush, when the undecided finally decided. This is not to say that �moral values� played only a supporting role in the Bush campaign. Moral values, as represented by the Christian fundamentalists in America�s conservative heartland, defined the Bush political persona and were the reason he was a formidable foe for any challenger even early in the campaign. In my article �Osama and Jesus� (Aug.05), I wrote that �The answer may lie in the fact that Born Again Bush�s biggest single source of grass-root political support is the Christian fundamentalists led by TV Evangelists Jerry Farwell and Pat Robertson who claim an adult following of 70 million, about half the US voting population�� �Despite the damning testimonies of several recently resigned top-level officials of his own government � that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 � George W. Bush remains unshakeable as the probable presidential winner in November��� And in my article �Uncle Dick and the PNAC� (Sept 07), I wrote that �Which is why it is very likely that George W will be re-elected president on Nov. 02. It would be very difficult for Challenger John Kerry to overcome the ignorance of the 70 million-strong (or about half the US electorate) Christian fundamentalists of TV Evangelists Jerry Farwell and Pat Robertson�..� A look at the political map of the US on Nov.02 showed Kerry�s blue states grouped together on the entire West Coast plus Hawaii, on the East Coast from Washington DC to New England, and on the Great Lakes region. States that are exposed, through trade, media and social interaction, to cosmopolitanism and liberalism from Asia, Europe and Canada (which, compared to Texas, is a leftist, liberal Sodom-and-Gomorrah).. Bush�s red states are mostly in the interior, including the Deep South and the Bible Belt where, in some of those states, to this day Darwin�s Theory of Evolution, one of the pillars of Western scientific thought, is not yet accepted as science, and law suits are still filed against anyone who dares teach it in the public schools. The winds of modern thought rarely blow into the red states, only occasional hurricanes from the Atlantic and the Caribbean, together with boat people from Haiti and wetbacks from across the Rio Grande, not anyone�s idea of trendsetters and innovators. It is in this culturally sterile environment that George W�s faith-based conservatism found the strongest resonance, long before John Kerry rose to challenge him. Jerry Farwell was not bragging when he said on CBS�60 Minutes (Oct. 15, 2003) that �the Christian public is Bush�s core constituency�.� On the specific issues of same-sex marriage, abortion and stem cell research, this conservatism appealed not only to Christian fundamentalists (also known as white evangelicals) but also to conservative Roman Catholics. According to exit polls, President Bush had the support of 78% (only?) of Christian fundamentalists, and 52% of Roman Catholics (56% of white Roman Catholics). Kerry, Jewish-born but a convert to Roman Catholicism, was supported by only 43% of white Roman Catholics. Significantly, Bush was supported by 61% of voters of all faiths who attend services weekly (who make up 41% of the electorate), Kerry by only 39%. On the other hand, Kerry had the support of 62% of voters who never attend church services, but they make up only 14% of the electorate. But aside from church-going and the specific issues of same-sex marriage, abortion and stem cell research, one must ask what moral values were involved in the other, larger issues in the presidential campaign, such as the war in Iraq. The Fifth Commandment in the Christian Decalogue says �Thou Shalt Not Kill.� Except in self-defense, says the modern interpretation. And yet what have the Iraqis done to the Americans that more than a hundred thousand of them have been killed in their own country without anything to indicate that they intended to harm the Americans in theirs? The Eighth Commandment says �Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor.� Or �Thou Shalt Not Lie.� And yet the entire invasion of Iraq was predicated on Two Big Lies: that the Iraqis had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. The Tenth Commandment says �Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor�s Goods.� And yet here is the mighty USA bullying Iraq with its 150-km range al-Samoud missiles (which cannot reach even Israel) and no nuclear warheads, while leaving North Korea alone with its 1,000-km range Taepodong-1 missile (able to hit US bases in South Korea, Japan, Alaska, Midway, Guam and Okinawa) and an estimated six to eight nuclear devices. The difference: Iraq has the second largest known oil deposits in the world; North Korea, not a drop. Uncle Dick�s Halliburton is drooling. What moral values are they talking about here? ***** The emergence of �moral values� as chic political buzz words has encouraged some well-meaning Filipinos to draw lessons from Bush�s victory. �A Filipino candidate winning the so-called �morality vote� would not be an impossibility,� said Archbishop Oscar Cruz, former president of the CBCP. Any candidate who would �quarrel against traditional values of the people� with respect to the sanctity of life and marriage would be easily junked by the electorate, he said. But haven�t we been through this before? In 1992, the Catholic bishops campaigned against Candidate Fidel Ramos, who was/is a Protestant and likely to promote artificial methods of birth control. But Ramos still won the presidency, at least in the counting. In 1995, the bishops also campaigned against Juan Flavier, a Roman Catholic married to a Protestant, who ran for senator openly espousing artificial methods of birth control. Yet he came out fifth or sixth (12 to win) in a field of more than 50. The moral issues in the Philippines are not abortion, same-sex marriage or stem cell research, or even artificial methods of birth control, but corruption and poverty. But all candidates, without exception, are against corruption and against poverty, and some of the most corrupt win. So what moral values are we talking about here? Reactions to [email protected]. Other articles in www.tapatt.org. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Reactions to �What Moral Values?� . Another smasheroo of a column, Tony. May I use part of all of this "moral values" column in my weblog? http://journals.aol.com/tony61798/ANIMOTENEO Tony Joaquin, [email protected] November 12, 2004 MY REPLY. Be my guest, Tony. wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Dear Tony, I agree with your assesment on George Bush's " what moral values" and especially your take on Karl Rove, the genius architect of his very successful propaganda campaign. I find your comparison of Karl Rove with Dr Joseph Goebbels, Hitler''s uber propagandist quite impressive. It was ironic that Hitler, thanks to Goebbels, was more than well received by the " church going and morally-correct" Catholic Bavarian South. I've been an advertising man all my professional life and I know the immense power of effective propaganda to shape men's minds. Lucifer the Archangel was the original adman who ever used a Mac to spin a woman's mind. Frank Jimenez, [email protected] West Orange, New Jersey November 13, 2004 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww You may appreciate the irony. Corruption during elections doesn't happen only in the Philippines. It happens on a grander scale here in the land of democracy. [email protected] November 15, 2004 Kerry Won Ohio By Greg Palast In These Times Friday 12 November 2004 Just count the ballots at the back of the bus. Most voters in Ohio chose Kerry. Here's how the votes vanished. This February, Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State, told his State Senate President, "The possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state�s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity." Blackwell, co-chair of Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, wasn't warning his fellow Republican of disaster, but boasting of an opportunity to bring in Ohio for Team Bush no matter what the voters wanted. And most voters in Ohio wanted JFK, not GWB. But their choice won't count because their votes won't be counted. The ballots that add up to a majority for John Kerry in Ohio -- and in New Mexico -- are locked up in two Republican hidey-holes: "spoiled" ballots and "provisional" ballots. Ohio spoiled rotten American democracy has a dark little secret. In a typical presidential election, two million ballots are simply chucked in the garbage, marked "spoiled" and not counted. A dive into the electoral dumpster reveals something special about these votes left to rot. In a careful county-by-county, precinct-by-precinct analysis of the Florida 2000 race, the US Civil Rights Commission discovered that 54% of the votes in the spoilage bin were cast by African-Americans. And Florida, Heaven help us, is typical. Nationwide, the number of Black votes "disappeared" into the spoiled pile is approximately one million. The other million in the no-count pit come mainly from Hispanic, Native-American and poor white precincts, a decidedly Democratic demographic. Ohio Republicans, simultaneously in charge of both the Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote drive and the state's vote-counting rules, doggedly and systematically insured the spoilage pile would be as high as the White House. Vote spoilage comes in two flavors. There are "overvotes" -- too many punches in the cards, and "undervotes." Here we find the hanging, dimpled and "pregnant" chads created by old, dysfunctional punch card machines, in which the bit of paper covering the hole doesn't fall out, but hangs on. Machines can't read these, but we humans, who know a hole when we see one, have no problem reading these cards � if allowed to. This is how Katherine Harris defeated Al Gore, by halting the hand count of the spoiled punch cards not, as is generally believed, by halting a "recount." Whose chads are left hanging? In Florida in 2000 federal investigators determined that Black voters' ballots spoiled 900% more often than white voters, mainly due to punch card error. Ohio Republicans found those racial odds quite attractive. The state was the only one of fifty to refuse to eliminate or fix these vote-eating machines, even in the face of a lawsuit by the ACLU. Apparently, the Ohio Republicans like what the ACLU found. The civil rights group's expert testimony concluded that Ohio's cussed insistence on forcing 73% of its electorate to use punch card machines had an "overwhelming" racial bias, voiding votes mostly in Black precincts. Blackwell doesn't disagree; and he hopes to fix the machinery � sometime after George Bush's next inauguration. In the meantime, the state's Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican, strategically postponed the trial date of the ACLU case until after the election. Fixing a punch card machine is cheap and easy. If Ohio simply placed a card-reading machine in each polling station, as Michigan did this year, voters could have checked to ensure their vote would tally. If not, they would have gotten another card. Blackwell knows that. He also knows that if those reading machines had been installed, almost all the 93,000 spoiled votes, overwhelmingly Democratic, would have closed the gap on George Bush's lead of 136,000 votes. Jim Crow's provisional ballot Add to the spoiled ballots a second group of uncounted votes, the 'provisional' ballots, and -- voila! -- the White House would have turned Democrat blue. But that won't happen because of the peculiar way provisional ballots are counted or, more often, not counted. Introduced by federal law in 2002, the provisional ballot was designed especially for voters of color. Proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus to save the rights of those wrongly scrubbed from voter rolls, it was, in Republican-controlled swing states, twisted into a back-of-the-bus ballot unlikely to be tallied. Unlike the real thing, these ballots are counted only by the whimsy and rules of a state's top elections official; and in Ohio, that gives a virtually ballot veto to Bush-Cheney campaign co-chair, Blackwell. Mr. Blackwell has a few rules to make sure a large proportion of provisional ballots won't be counted. For the first time in memory, the Secretary of State has banned counting ballots cast in the "wrong" precinct, though all neighborhoods share the same President. Over 155,000 Ohio voters were shunted to these second-class ballots. The election-shifting bulge in provisional ballots (more than 3% of the electorate) was the direct result of the national Republican strategy that targeted African-American precincts for mass challenges on election day. This is the first time in four decades that a political party has systematically barred -- in this case successfully -- hundreds of thousands of Black voters from access to the voting booth. While investigating for BBC Television, we obtained three dozen of the Republican Party's confidential "caging" lists, their title for spreadsheets listing names and addresses of voters they intended to block on any pretext. We found that every single address of the thousands on these Republican hit lists was located in Black-majority precincts. You might find that nasty and racist. It may also be a crime. Before 1965, Jim Crow laws in the Deep South did not bar Blacks from voting. Rather, the segregationist game was played by applying minor technical voting requirements only to African-Americans. That year, Congress voted to make profiling and impeding minority voters, even with a legal pretext, a criminal offence under the Voting Rights Act. But that didn't stop the Republicans of '04. Their legally questionable mass challenge to Black voters is not some low-level dirty tricks operation of local party hacks. Emails we obtained show the lists were copied directly to the Republican National Committee's chief of research and to the director of a state campaign. Many challenges center on changes of address. On one Republican caging list, 50 addresses changed from Jacksonville to overseas, African-American soldiers shipped Over There. You don't have to guess the preferences registered on the provisional ballots. Republicans went on a challenging rampage, while Democrats pledged to hold to the tradition of letting voters vote. Blackwell has said he will count all the "valid" provisional ballots. However, his rigid regulations, like the new guess-your-precinct rule, are rigged to knock out enough voters to keep Bush's skinny lead alive. Other pre-election maneuvers by Republican officials -- late and improbably large purges of voter rolls, rejection of registrations -- maximized the use of provisional ballots which will never be counted. For example, a voter wrongly tagged an ineligible "felon" voter (and there's plenty in that category, mostly African-Americans), will lose their ballot even though they are wrongly identified. Kerry blacks out It was heartening that, during his campaign, John Kerry broke the political omerta that seems to prohibit public mention of the color of votes not counted in America. "Don't tell us that in the strongest democracy on earth a million disenfranchised African Americans is the best we can do." The Senator promised the NAACP convention, "This November, we're going to make sure that every single vote is counted." But this week, Kerry became the first presidential candidate in history to break a campaign promise after losing an election. The Senator waited less than 24 hours to abandon more than a quarter million Ohio voters still waiting for their provisional and chad-spoiled ballots to be counted. While disappointing, I can understand the cold calculus against taking the fight to the end. To count the ballots, Kerry's lawyers would, first, have to demand a hand reading of the punch cards. Blackwell, armed with the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore diktat, would undoubtedly pull a "Kate Harris" by halting or restricting a hand count. Most daunting, Kerry's team would also, as one state attorney general pointed out to me, have to litigate each and every rejected provisional ballot in court. This would entail locating up to a hundred thousand voters to testify to their right to the vote, with Blackwell challenging each with a holster full of regulations from the old Jim Crow handbook. Given the odds and the cost to his political career, Kerry bent, not to the will of the people, but to the will to power of the Ohio Republican machine. We have yet to total here the votes lost in missing absentee ballots, in eyebrow-raising touch screen tallies, in purges of legal voters from registries and other games played in swing states. But why dwell on these things? Our betters in the political and media elite have told us to get over it, move on. To the victors go the spoils of electoral class war. As Ohio's politically ambitious Secretary of State brags on his own website, "Last time I checked, Katherine Harris wasn't in a soup line, she's in Congress." New Mexico goes Kerry - But who's counting? Why single out Ohio? So it also went in New Mexico where ballots of Hispanic voters (two-to-one Kerry supporters) spoil at a rate five times that of white voters. Add in the astounding 13,000 provisional ballots in the Enchanted State -- handed out "like candy" to Hispanic, not white, voters according to a director of the Catholic Church's get-out-the-vote drive -- and Kerry wins New Mexico. Just count up the votes � but that won't happen. Investigative reporter Greg Palast is author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin 2004) OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |