David

Karki

Read David's bio and previous columns here

October 20, 2008

Halfway to a Banana Republic

Stuffed ballot boxes and state-run media were once the stuff of tinpot dictators and communist regimes, from Kim Jong Il's North Korea to Hugo Chavez's Venezeula, from Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Fidel Castro's Cuba. Once, we would look at these countries and wonder how things could ever have gotten that far out of hand. And then we'd be thankful that such things didn't and couldn't happen here in America.

Fast forward to 2008, and the formerly unthinkable has become reality. The ultra-liberal group ACORN, under whose aegis Sen. Barack Obama got his start in politics and with whom he's had a long and close relationship (to the point of his campaign donating $830,000 to them), has been investigated for voter fraud in some 17 states. Phony registrations by ACORN bearing the names of the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys and even Mickey Mouse have been found. The FBI is conducting a federal investigation of them under the RICO anti-racketeering statutes.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Secretary of State in Ohio, Jennifer Brunner, has admitted to secretly holding onto 200,000 likely fraudulent voter registrations. And the Supreme Court just ruled that the Ohio Republican Party doesn't have standing to sue, so even if they find an appropriate plaintiff and re-file, she can run out the clock until Election Day and dump all these ballots into the total count.

And this is likely just the tip of the iceberg. It defies common sense to think that ACORN isn't active in all 50 states, pulling the same criminal stunts so as to rig the outcome the way they'd like it to be. The only reason we haven't heard more is that many states have attorneys general and secretaries of state who are partisan liberal allies of ACORN and they're not going to look. They'll just paraphrase the Wizard of Oz: “Ignore that cheating behind the scenes! The great and powerful Oz has spoken!”

What of the media? It used to be their job to expose such corruption in high places. Alas, they too have thrown in with their leftist allies. They now serve more as a weapon to intimidate those who'd hurt the chances of liberal candidates by speaking out, than anything resembling “reporting.” And they are completely in the tank for Obama, willing to propagandize on his behalf, covering up his associations and background while giving a veritable proctologist exam to those they want to destroy, like Gov. Sarah Palin.

Witness how fast the media was able to splash Palin's daughter's pregnancy all over the tabloids and hypocritically beat her up for it. Or try desperately to manufacture a phony scandal over the justified firing of an Alaska state trooper who tasered a child and was drunk on the job.

And in the last few days, they've unleashed their wrath on “Joe the Plumber,” one Joe Wurzelbacher of Holland, Ohio, who had the audacity to ask Obama why his taxes ought to be raised and object to the Marxist answer he received (gotta “spread the wealth around”). They've checked out his taxes and the status of his plumber's license, and probably have his kids' report cards as their ace-in-the-hole.

Yet they just can't manage to ask Obama to explain his long-time associations with an America-hating terrorist (William Ayers) and a racist pastor (Jeremiah Wright) or release his original birth certificate, which might just prove he's not a natural-born citizen and therefore constitutionally ineligible to become president.

Joe the Plumber can't affect any of us at all, and they ransack his life. Obama could take our money, property, liberty and freedom away in service of socialist redistribution, and he's untouched.

And to cap it all off, there were the pre-written “analyses” of Wednesday's last debate, in which Sen. John McCain soundly defeated Obama, though you'd never know it unless you saw it yourself. Obama could have pratfallen over the desk ala Chevy Chase while McCain channeled George Washington and Abraham Lincoln rolled into one and the media would have said the former had won. Their “scorecards” were as rigged as the birth certificates of the Chinese women gymnasts at the Beijing games.

We are frighteningly close to having elections with no more credibility than those of the aforementioned tinpot dictators. If we should lose that integrity, we lose the republic with it. The experiment in self-government that is America would be over. And we would be just as much a banana republic as a third-world thugocracy.

This cannot be allowed to happen, and if it somehow does, I would hope that a great many Americans would do what the Declaration of Independence counsels:

“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [securing inalienable rights], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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