Loosey Goosey Hits The Wall - Road to the Middle Class

SHED a tear for the Democrats. They didn’t just lose the presidency in November 2004. Their whole loosey-goosey approach to voting hit the wall. In the middle of the splat is Washington State’s dead-heat gubernatorial contest between Dino Rossi and Christine Gregoire. As the election is contested in the courts, we are finally getting to look inside the sausage factory.

If you want the color commentary about Democrats and election trickery, you should buy talk-show-host-and-blogger-extraordinaire Hugh Hewitt’s If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat. You will read a gripping story that begins back in the days of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. But to get the play-by-play, you should check in every morning with KTTH Seattle morning host Mike Siegel, Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF) President Bob Williams and Stefan Sharkansky of www.soundpolitics.com as they take Democratic wieners off the line in liberal King County and slice them up.

Last November, in sensitive, compassionate Seattle, the election laws were routinely flouted and ignored. Against the law, according to EFF: “At least 8,419 more votes were cast in five counties than the number of people who signed in to vote.” Against the law, hundreds of felons got to vote. Against the law, hundreds of provisional ballots got mixed in with regular ballots. Ballots were left unsecured. Some precincts ran out of ballots and election officials went to Kinko’s to print up more. The American Thinker has already covered this story here and here.

It gets worse. The Washington State legislature passed a law in 2003 to conform state law to the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, but Secretary of State Sam Reed failed to issue regulations to implement the law. You can read Evergreen Freedom Foundation’s report here.

All this didn’t happen in Boss Tweed’s corrupt New York City. Oh no. It happened in sensitive, educated, liberal Seattle.

But let us be understanding towards the Democrats. They realize that their voters cannot be relied upon to get registered months in advance of an election, or to have remembered to bring the right identification, or even to have figured out where to vote. So Democrats have consistently pushed for relaxation of the rules governing elections, allowing people to cast a “provisional ballot” at a precinct if their name doesn’t appear on the voter’s register. President Clinton’s Motor Voter Law made it easier to register to vote. But gradually, step-by-step, year by year, as the election laws were relaxed, fraud and abuse tiptoed in. That was the idea, as the Motor Voter Law “imposed fraud-friendly rules” on the states, according to John Fund in Stealing Elections.

In the good old days the politicians and the media would have laughed it off, as they did when “Landslide Lyndon” Johnson squeaked to a Senate victory in 1948 with the infamous ballot box 13, and as they did when Jack Kennedy was elected president with the help of skilled political professionals from Richard Daley’s Chicago and Lyndon Johnson’s Texas. But now we have bloggers and talk radio. Now, all of a sudden, the good old boys aren’t laughing any more.

There’s a bigger story to loosey-goosey than merely counting the votes. It was John Kerry’s loosey-goosey story about his Vietnam service that inspired the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, and it was CBS’s loosey-goosey story about President Bush’s National Guard service that provoked Blogger Nation into checking their documents for verisimilitude. The loosey-goosey tradition of “no enemies on the left” in the academy is hitting the wall as Ward Churchill finds himself uninvited at colleges all over America. And Eason Jordan’s loosey-goosey story about the U.S. military “targeting journalists” hit the wall at the February 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos with the help of a blogger. Loosey-goosey just doesn’t cut it any more.

In the real world outside the loosey-goosey sector, things are different. In the globalized business sector, the watchword is “transparency.” It means: trust, following the rules, no secrets, no surprises.

But in the American loosey-goosey sector, transparency operates like a one-way mirror. We get to look at everything you do, but you don’t get to look at us, because we are politicians and we care about people, or we are college professors and we have academic freedom, or we are journalists, protectors of the peoples’ right to know.

Loosey-goosey has its place. Nobody minds if two people in a trust relationship cut each other some slack. But when they cut each other slack to screw a third person, that is different. You can call it what you like: betrayal, cheating, fraud, conspiracy. You could call it Washington State.

On conservative website www.Lucianne.com they recently put up a tag to their FAQ link for online posters: “We are conservatives. Rules are important.” Like Wile E. Coyote, Democrats eternally hope that some Acme Corner-cutting Kit will help them catch the Roadrunner. They can’t seem to learn that rules are important—because they help you win.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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