Joni Mitchell friends: I have been struggling with how to share this with my friends in the JMDL without imposing on those who do not want to read political things OR not read political things that imply that somehow Bush's election was not quite kosher. So... If you want to *not* read this, don't! Delete this post now! If you keep reading, it is by your own choice! (the Rev) Vince The following was published in the print edition of the Chicago Tribune on 8 December 2000. The text below was sent to me courtesy of Professor Feigon. I had searched the Tribune site repeatedly but could not find the article on the website; Professor Feigon was kind enough to foreward the article to me. HMMM, SAY WE WERE IN CHINA Subject: Forwarded article: HMMM, SAY WE WERE IN CHINA The following article was selected from the Internet Edition of the Chicago Tribune. To visit the site, point your browser to http://chicagotribune.com/. > ----------- Chicago Tribune Article Forwarding---------------- > > > Article forwarded by: Lee Feigon > > Return e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Article URL: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/article/0,2669,SAV-001 2080074,FF.html ---Forwarded article---------------- HMMM, SAY WE WERE IN CHINA By Lee Feigon. Lee Feigon is a professor of Chinese history at Colby College. As a sinologist I can't help but think that if the events of election eve had transpired not in the United States but in a place like China, voters and TV viewers would not have been surprised by the results. As confusing as things might appear to Americans, the explanation would have seemed obvious to anyone used to a more authoritarian tradition of leaders: The Bush family rigged the results. Consider the family's background. George W. Bush's father is not just the former president of the United States but also the one-time head of the CIA. As secretary of defense in Bush's administration, Dick Cheney was responsible for the National Security Agency, a spook organization more powerful than the Central Intelligence Agency. Jeb Bush, the Republican candidate's brother and governor of Florida, spent years living and working in South America, where elections routinely have been manipulated by American-trained operatives. Now remember what happened on the evening of the election. Every television network called Florida for Gore about 8 p.m. The Bush camp quickly protested, arguing the returns from absentee ballots and rural counties might yet be different from what the networks had declared. Jeb Bush, we were told, was on the phone with Florida desperately trying to find extra votes. Many of us wondered: "What was Jeb Bush doing? The votes have already been cast." Then the votes the Bush people had predicted suddenly began to appear. By 2 a.m., the networks were calling the election for Bush. In a twist that many Chinese might be able to appreciate, this result was also not to remain in place for long. If clever operatives had fiddled with the election returns they would want the predictions to change back and forth a few times so it would look like the problem had been caused by the experts at the networks not by someone playing with the results? The focus on uncounted and difficult to use ballots in Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Broward Counties would be the perfect smokescreen to keep the attention off chicanery elsewhere in the state. Couldn't this explain why the Bush side didn't want to accept Vice President Al Gore's offer of a statewide recount, even when it appeared in their interest to do so? "Nah," I think. "These kind of things don't happen in America." But the sinologist voice in the back of my head keeps working. If this were China I would look for indications that the family had used their spook connections to manipulate other events. Didn't someone do a pretty good job covering up George W. Bush's absenteeism from his National Guard duty? For years the record of his drunk-driving conviction remained suppressed. He even got out of the rehab program everyone convicted of drunk driving in the state of Maine was supposed to attend. There's also that supposedly determinative first presidential debate. Shortly before this debate, videotapes of George W.'s preparation sessions suddenly arrived in the office of Gore's debate coach. Rather than run the risk of appearing tainted, the coach removed himself from Gore's debate preparations. Gore's performance suffered. The story was that a disaffected worker in the Bush camp probably sent the tapes, but the person still hasn't been found. All this doesn't add up to a hill of beans. This isn't China. Only someone like me would even think about how after the elder George Bush lived in China in the 1970s, he restarted a previously dead-end political career. Even I won't make anything of the fact that not long after that his once good for nothing elder son made a fortune, got elected governor and then became a candidate for the presidency. It's a good thing we don't live in some country where all this would be looked on with suspicion.
