It’s just too evil to contemplate.
It is obvious now that the Bush brothers manipulated the 2000 result. If the 2004 election were stolen as well, and we’ve essentially been under a coup d’etat for almost six years, the implications are just too enormous to deal with.
Maybe it would be different if the Bush Administration were a raging success. But it hasn’t been. It has been a miserable failure, on every level. It seems at times as though the President were maliciously trying to destroy this country and what it stands for.
That’s how liberals view it.
And if he never was elected, never ever chosen in a free election, what does that say about our vaunted 200 year old system? What does that say of our prospects as a people in 2006 and beyond? What does it say to the world?
What it says is that America can never be trusted again, not even by Americans. It means American elections will always be subject to questioning. It means the destruction of the dream of America, of American exceptionalism.
Too frightening to contemplate. Better to ignore it.
Of course, to those who understand The Long View, it’s not hard to see at all.
Remember that the genesis of the Nixon Thesis is that the 1960 election of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s uncle, John Kennedy, was stolen. The Thesis holds it was stolen by Mayor Daley in Illinois, by Lyndon Johnson’s pals in Texas.
To those who follow the Thesis, this excused whatever Nixon did later. It also excused anything his acolytes did — among them Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George H.W. Bush.
And the Thesis learned the wrong lesson from Watergate as well. The lesson they learned was don’t surrender anything. Don’t give in on anything. Ever.
This is built into our political DNA, the idea that victory goes only to the most ruthless, and that the other side is doing it all too, only worse. The idea that, at its heart, American politics and American democracy are a charade hiding bare-knuckle tactics.
This is why the Thesis went after Clinton so hard. He couldn’t beat us — he must have cheated. According to the Thesis, even Carter’s election is suspect. It was because Ford pardoned Nixon, because Ford showed weakness.
Thus, the idea that the 2000 and 2004 elections might have been stolen is not too far-fetched. Any Democrat must admit that, at minimum, both were fairly close.
And this is the biggest mistake the Thesis makes. I think these people believe that if close elections can be stolen, then any election can be stolen.
That’s just not so.
At some point (and polls indicate we are at or near that point now) you can’t steal an election and get away with it. It takes an enormous conspiracy to steal an election, a conspiracy born in this case of a fiercely-believed Thesis, and when your support starts cutting into your base — when those who believed in you turn away — then the chances you’ll be stopped increase exponentially.
And if you do steal a landslide loss, revolution will result. If the vast majority of Americans truly believed they were living in a dictatorship, a second Civil War would be well and truly underway. Think it’s hard to hold Baghdad? Try holding America. Can’t be done. Not against our will. And if you’re taken out in a revolution, you and everyone who believed in you will be killed, either along the way or in the aftermath.
I think that when this Thesis is stopped, when we finally get a chance to investigate everything that has happened in America and to America in this decade, well, I don’t think there will ever be a George W. Bush Library. If these elections were stolen, and if half of what is charged is true, the only library Bush will ever see will be in Leavenworth, or The Hague.
This is a fate too monstrous for the major media to contemplate. Because if it were all true, they would be complicit. The blood would be on the hands of every reporter who turned away, who ignored the evidence, who was just too scared to go on, or who actively participated.
There would, in other words, be real hell to pay.
The press dare not even think that.
So the thought is ignored. So is the story.
