Why Has The Media Refused To Examine The 2000 Bush Election Theft?

By James Donahue

The American media has traditionally been hot to chase after great news stories and once they are on them, milk them until the general public is sick of hearing about the matter. But something seems to have gone awry in recent years. Real news stories are going by the board as the talking heads waste their time on minutia that offers no consequence in the scheme of things.

One story that some reporters have tried to tell, but can’t get off the ground, has been the theft of the 2000 presidential election by the Bush Administration.

That flawed election, where voting across the nation was so close the final tallies in Florida were going to decide everything, may go down in history as a deciding moment in the fall of this great nation.

Our election system is so complex that it is easy for television viewers and news anchors alike to get so caught up in numbers and statistics that they become confused as to the important things going on in front of our eyes. If you remember, there was confusion in Florida over many of the votes cast through a certain type voting machine. And when it came down to a recount, there was a big argument over whether or not to count “hanging chads,” or holes only partially punched in voting cards.

“Recount,” new HBO film, apparently reveals why there were so many hanging chads on those ballot cards. Seven former employees of Sequoia Voting Systems, the company that produced the state’s paper ballots in 2000, are quoted as saying they were forced by company officials to use inferior paper for those ballots. These were ballots going only to Florida. They said they were also ordered to misalign the chads so they would not fall away freely.

It appears that the Florida debacle was well planned. Then the question has to be asked, how did they know the election would be decided in Florida, and how was that arranged? It obviously took advance planning to make sure there were problems with those election cards.

The confusion over the Florida election reigned for days before the matter was sent to the U.S. Supreme Court for a final decision. That court gave the election to Bush, even though Democrat Al Gore had clearly won the popular vote.

When it came down to the final tally, the election was so close, it was calculated that Gore lost Florida by only 537 votes.

But did he lose Florida? It later was learned that Katherine Harris, the head of the 2000 GOP election campaign in Florida, removed 57,700 names from the state’s voter roles that fall on grounds that they were all felons. These were people who lived in districts that normally would have voted predominately Democratic, thus cast their votes for Gore.

When all was said and done, investigators found that 95 percent of the people accused by Harris of having committed felonies were innocent of anything. They had been just robbed of their right to vote in that election.

Former NBC Anchor Dan Rather recently produced an HDNet report that revealed the corruption that went on in that Florida election debacle.

In spite of Rather’s excellent record as a top-notch journalist, his documentary was never picked up by any of the major networks. It was as if nobody cared.

Our concern is that Bush and the people manipulating his administration have been in power for eight consecutive years. They did not earn that post. It now is clear that it was stolen from Al Gore.

With all of the tomfoolery associated with the struggle over party nominations this year, we have to wonder if we aren’t falling directly into another election set-up. Do the American people have any real say as to who they chose for leadership or is the whole process just a scam?

As we watch the two Democratic contenders, Hillary Clinton, the first woman and Barack Obama, the first black man to seek the nomination, slug it out in a contest that has gone on for over a year without any real winners appearing, we get the sense that we are watching one of those staged televised wrestling matches. The competition looks real and ugly, but in the end, it is all a show designed to amuse the watchers.