Ready to rumble? Village Voice Author, Rick Perlstein, Here to Debate the Freeper Horde

I once suffered two great frustrations in being a freelance political writer. First, the loneliness: you put an article out there, and you might as well have thrown it down a black hole for all the response you get. Second, the ghettoization: when you do get response, it would be from folks you agree with. Not fun for folks like me who reliish--no, crave and need--political argument.

I have especially enjoyed having my articles in the Village Voice posted on Free Republic by "dead," and arguing about them here. The only frustration is that I never have enough time--and sometimes no time--to respond as the threads are going on. That is why I arranged for an entire afternoon--this afternoon--to argue on Free Republic. Check out my articles and have at me.

A little background: I am a proud leftist who specializes in writing about conservatives. I have always admired conservatives for their political idealism, acumen, stalwartness, and devotion. I have also admired some of their ideas--especially the commitment to distrusting grand social schemes, and the deep sense of the inherent flaws in human nature. (To my mind the best minds in the liberal tradition have encompassed these ideals, while still maintaining that robust social reform is still possible and desirable. My favorite example is the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, author of the Serenity Prayer and a great liberal Democrat.)

Lately, however, I've become mad at the right, and have written about it with an anger not been present in my previous writings. It began with the ascension of George Bush, when I detected many conservatives beginning to care more about power than principles. The right began to seem less interesting to me--more whiny, more shallow--and, what's more, in what I saw as an uncritical devotion to President Bush, often in retreat from its best insights about human nature.

I made my strongest such claim in a Village Voice article two weeks ago in which I, after much thought, chose to say conservatism was "verging on becoming an un-American creed" for the widespread way conservatives are ignoring the lessons of James Madison's great insights in Federalist 51 that in America we are supposed to place our ultimate trust in laws, not men.

Finally, in what I see as the errors of the Iraq campaign, I recognize the worst aspects of arrogant left-wing utopianism: the idea that you can remake a whole society and region through sheer force of will. I think Iraq is a tragic disaster (though for the time being the country is probably better off than it was when Saddam was around--but only, I fear, for the time being).

So: I'm yours for the day--until 7:10 pm CST, when I'm off to compete in my weekly trivia contest at the University of Chicago Pub. Until then: Are you ready to rumble?

"You can come up with a better argument than this for invading Iraq."

I can. I've been studying him for 16 years. Saddam made no secret of the fact that he donated ground for taining, funded and exported terrorism. That alone made him a prime target of the war on terror as outlined by the president after 9/11/01.

IMO, the administration erred seriously in allowing the left to twist the terrorism question into nothing but a WMD question. The wisdom was that listing all the reasons would confuse the average American. Instead what the administration did was play into the left's hands.

Saddam was in material breach of UN Security Council Resolution 1441: he did not account for his missing WMD, intimidated inspectors, bugged their offices and his operatives were uncooperative and unhelpful (source, Hanx Blix) Those weapons remain unaccounded for.

Saddam violated 1141 again when he ordered a UN sanctioned and sealed U2 fired on, after agreeing to allow a run....but I don't know if anyone remembers that. The UN was pathetically eager to believe his "it was an honest mistake" explanation.

In fact, Saddam was in material breach of every single UN resolution through his refusal to comply. He was thereby in material breech of the terms of his surrender agreement. ,p>For 12 years the world played cat and mouse games with Saddam while he and corrupt officials, media personalities and corperations profited from the oil for food scam. In the meantime, he was free to export terrorism and cause thousands of deaths a year while paying foreign media types and politicians to spread his particular brand of Soviet style propaganda and keep his benevolent self in power, while causing untold suffering to his own people.

During that 12 years he was an exceptional threat to the stability of the Mideast.

You may believe Iraq is better off without Saddam. That's true. The world is safer and better off without him, too. It will take a long time to begin reversing the damage Saddam did.

1. Bush weapons inspector David Kay says there is no evidence. David Kay was on the ground for months investigating the activities of Hussein's regime. He concluded "But we simply did not find any evidence of extensive links with Al Qaeda, or for that matter any real links at all." He called a speech where Cheney made the claim there was a link "evidence free."

A willful lie or ignorance?

From the report:
We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN. Let me just give you a few examples of these concealment efforts, some of which I will elaborate on later:

A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.

A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.

Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist's home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.

New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.

Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists' homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).

A line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.

Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the UN.

Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km - well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets through out the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.

Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles --probably the No Dong -- 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment.

2. The 9/11 Commission says there is no evidence. The staff report of the 9/11 commission concluded that there was "no credible evidence" that Hussein and al-Qaeda were collaborating. According to the commission, Bin Laden was hostile to Hussein's secular government and Hussein never responded to requests for help in providing training camps or supplies.

A willful lie or ignorance?

The 9/11 Commission made a finding that there was no evidence that Iraq collaborated in 9/11. They also stated that their did not "appear" to be a concrete connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq on attacks on the United States. But despite that statement the report is replete with contacts between Iraq and bin Laden and it is known that bin LAden, like Nidal and Abbas was offered sancturay in Iraq. So much for the secular/jihadist bs. Did you read the report or did you just go see Michael Moores pack of lies?

3. Colin Powell says there is no evidence. In January, Colin Powell said there was no "concrete evidence" of a connection between Hussein and al-Qaeda.

Colin Powell is contradicted by the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee.

4. The U.N. says there is no evidence. Michael Chandler, The chairman of the Security Council group monitoring sanctions against al-Qaeda said there was "no evidence of a link between the terrorist organization and the former Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein."

I don't comment on the UN morons.

Without going into a discussion of the 1960 West Virginia Presidential election, here is one take on the Democratic idea of how to do a manual recount successfully (for the Democrats):

To view this item online, visit ttp://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=17718

Monday, November 13, 2000

'How Democrats steal elections'
Veterans of hand recounts describe techniques used to change outcome

IMPORTANT NOTE: The following exclusive investigative report is included in the current edition of WND's monthly Whistleblower magazine, "THE PARTY OF TREASON."

By Jon E. Dougherty and David Kupelian

© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com

The manual vote recounts being insisted on by Democratic operatives in Palm Beach County, Fla., have been used for over 20 years to steal elections from Republicans, claim several GOP veterans of hand-recount election-upsets.

According to Bob Haueter, who served as chief of staff for former California Assembly Minority Leader Scott Baugh, and who is an expert on manual recounts, a Democrat lawyer intimately involved in "stealing" elections from Republicans through hand recounts admitted to the process and even shared the techniques involved.

After Tuesday's vote and an automatic recount still left GOP nominee George W. Bush ahead by a slim 288-vote margin, Palm Beach elections officials decided that a manual recount of all 425,000 votes should be undertaken.

"What's happening in Florida is exactly the game plan laid out to me by an attorney who represented the Democrats in a recount in California where they stole a seat from us," former California Assemblyman Pat Nolan told WorldNetDaily.

A staunch conservative legislator, Nolan served in the California Assembly from 1978 until 1994, when he was convicted, along with several other lawmakers, in a federal corruption probe. After spending a little over two years in federal prison, he emerged to become president of Justice Fellowship, the public policy arm of Watergate figure Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries. For the past four years, Nolan has worked with Colson -- another fallen-but-reformed public figure -- to reform the criminal justice system.

Regarding the 1980 California Assembly race between Republican Adrian Fondse and Democrat Pat Johnston, Nolan recalled that the Republican won "by about 54 votes or so."

But after the election, Democrats "brought in their junkyard dog lawyers from around the country," said Nolan, "and basically harassed the local registrar -- got in their faces and demanded to handle ballots" -- which were of the same type now in dispute in Palm Beach.

The same issue of "hanging chads -- the little squares in the punch cards -- was also an issue in Stockton," says Nolan. The Democrats' strategy, he says, was to handle them as often as possible -- perhaps bending, crinkling or otherwise altering them -- so that additional chads become displaced, thereby disqualifying the ballot.

The result? In the Stockton election, Nolan said Democrats were successful in getting the vote count reversed from a plus-54 win by Republicans to a minus-17 loss.

"I vowed that I'd never let that happen again," Nolan said. "So I asked my staff to track down the lawyer that headed up the team for the Democrats."

Haueter was, at that time, chief of staff for Nolan, and it was he who first contacted attorney Tim Downs, who readily admitted the Democratic strategy and even described the tactics to Nolan.

"When I first called him and explained to him who I was and why I was calling, he chuckled and said, 'I wondered when you guys would get around to calling me,'" Haueter said, adding that Downs told him -- "'I've taken several seats from you across the United States.'"

"Downs told me, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, 'You get me within 100 votes and I can steal any election,'" Haueter told WorldNetDaily.

Nolan subsequently hired Downs and "brought him out to train my staff in the techniques they [Democrats] were using" so they could protect themselves against future election-fraud victimization, Nolan said.

Nolan and Haueter said Downs described three basic tactics:

"The first rule is, you keep counting until you're ahead. And if that doesn't put you ahead, you recount, re-recount -- you keep counting until you're ahead. If you're behind, then you've got nothing to lose."

Second, Nolan said, "the more times those ballots are handled, the more chance there is that chads will break loose" and hence disqualify the ballot.

Third, he said, "the minute you're ahead, you stop and declare yourself the victor."

"After that, you don't want the ballots handled any more," Nolan said, "because some of the chads for your candidate might break loose. While you're behind it doesn't matter, but if you're ahead and more break off or become disqualified for your candidate, that's a bad thing."
A favorite tactic, said Nolan, is to ask election officials for ballots, "allegedly so they can look at it more closely." When operatives do, often they will bend or crinkle ballots covertly in an effort to break another chad loose and thus have the ballot thrown out.

"This whole process sounds like exactly what is going on in Florida," Nolan said. "And the more times those ballots are handled, the more chances are you'll break some of them [chads] loose."

Nolan referred to Fox News' Tony Snow's weekend interview with Bush campaign representative and former Secretary of State James Baker, in which he asked Baker why -- after each time election officials run ballots through mechanical vote-tally machines -- there have been more votes counted or taken away from both candidates.

"Baker didn't have an answer to that," Nolan said. "But the answer is, because they've handled those ballots more times, breaking loose more of those chads" -- those that perhaps weren't completely punched through.

"The tactics fit what [Downs] told me back in 1982 and 1983," Nolan said, who added that he didn't know who Downs may have worked with using these tactics recently.

WorldNetDaily attempted to reach Downs by phone on Sunday, but was unsuccessful.

Following a mechanical recount over the weekend, Palm Beach election officials awarded an additional 36 votes to Gore, while Bush lost three.

"A hand count of four selected precincts turned up enough additional votes for Gore to prompt the Democratic majority on the county election commission to order the hand recount in all 531 precincts," the Associated Press reported.

Republicans, news accounts said, lodged "strenuous protests" and pledged to file a lawsuit halting yet another recount of Palm Beach votes. That hearing is scheduled for today.

Reports said nearly 30,000 ballots have already been rejected in Palm Beach County because they had two or more holes punched for president, or because computers could not detect any holes at all. Ballots with two votes also are rejected in hand counts.

Corroborating Haueter's and Nolan's account is a parallel story by Los Angeles-area political strategist Arnold Steinberg. In a National Review.com piece titled "Beware of Hanging Chads," Steinberg asks, "Do you know what two words will determine the Presidential election?" The chilling answer, he said: "Hanging chads."

Steinberg, describing a 1980 congressional race between long-time incumbent, Democrat James C. Corman, and Steinberg's client, Republican challenger Bobbi Fiedler, recalls how after Fiedler's upset victory -- by a slim margin -- over the heavily favored Corman, the Democrats called for a hand recount.

"Democratic Party lawyers and recount specialists descended on the county registrar's office," says Steinberg. "Each recount station had a government employee to do the counting, flanked by one Democratic and one Republican observer.

"The Democrats' agenda was, of course, to change the election result, and they went about it systematically. At their urging, the recounting began with Corman's strongest precincts, Fiedler's weakest. Their intention was to recount ballots in those areas until the election outcome was reversed, and then stop the recount. Similarly, today in Florida, the Gore people are demanding hand recounts in their favored counties, where they would be most likely to gain."

Just as important as the order in which the precincts are recounted, however, is outright ballot tampering, says Steinberg.

"Their hired guns tried lots of tricks on Corman's behalf, but what I remember most was the hanging chads. A chad is the perforated square (or circle) on the ballot that a voter depresses with a pin to indicate his preferred candidate. The chad hangs from the ballot if the voter didn't fully depress it -- for instance, if an older person did not press firmly enough. This matters because voter machines usually are not able to tabulate cards with hanging chads.

"It often comes down to interpreting the voter's intention. Does the chad hang 'strongly' -- i.e, detached only a little -- meaning that it is a mistake that should not be counted? Or does it hang loosely -- i.e., mostly detached -- as an intended vote would be?

"What my lawyers soon discovered was that the opposition would eyeball a disputed ballot before picking it up to officially inspect it. If the hanging chad indicated a vote for Fiedler, the lawyer for the other side picked up the ballot ever so carefully, so he could argue that the voter really never intended to vote for Fiedler. If the hanging chad was a Corman vote, the lawyer picked up the ballot quite vigorously, so that the chad soon was no longer hanging.

"'You see,' their guy would declare, 'that voter obviously intended to vote for Corman.'"

Luckily, says Steinberg, "it didn't take long to figure out all the opposition's tricks. I added more lawyers, more observers, and the bad guys eventually caved. Bobbi Fiedler's victory was preserved. But it was a nasty business."

Echoing Nolan's and Haueter's experience with manual-vote recounts, Steinberg says, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

Jon Dougherty is a staff reporter and David Kupelian is managing editor of WorldNetDaily.com.

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