A lot of folks have been asking me why I haven't written anything in a while.

I haven't been talking politics, either.  Lately, whenever somebody
brings up George W. Bush or Florida politics in general, I say the same thing:
"I don't want to talk about it. I haven't been watching TV news, either.
Or listening to NPR or even reading the newspaper.

To be honest, it scares me.  What happened in this election was never
supposed to happen in this country, and it really shook me up. I needed
to shut down for a little while to come to grips with it all, and it's
just now that I can really start thinking about it again.

Trouble is, now that I'm thinking about it again, I'm twice as pissed.

In 1775, Thomas Paine wrote what would turn out to be a chief rallying document
of the American Revolution:  "Common Sense:  The Call to Independence."
It began like this:

"As a long and violent abuse of power is generally the Means of calling
the right of it in question (and in Matters too which might never have
been thought of, had not the Sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry)
and as the King of England hath undertaken in his own Right to support
the Parliament in what he calls Theirs, and as the good people of this
country are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an
undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and
equally to reject the usurpation of either."

Well.

Substitute "President" Bush for the King of England and the U.S.
Congress for the Parliament, and we got ourselves a parallel.
It's almost like Thomas Paine was in Florida on November 7th.

The Republicans have been quite out of hand for a long time now.
Let's forget for a moment everything from Watergate back and just
focus on the last twenty years.  That's the great thing about Republicans:
they're always committing a new crime we can be mad about.

Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. manipulated the 1980 elections by
promising weapons to Iranian terrorists if they would hold our hostages
until after the election.  It worked.  It made Jimmy Carter look weak
and Reagan won in a landslide.

Reagan and Bush Sr. then proceeded to sink this country into the worst
economy since the Great Depression.

But then Bill Clinton came along and kicked them out of the White House.
The Republicans didn't like that.  The Republicans need their power.
When he started to clean up the mess they made, it made the Republicans look bad.
They liked that even less.  So they abused the power of the Independent Counsel's
office and investigated the man for six years.  And when they couldn't find any
real crimes, they made some up and impeached him.

But that didn't work.  So they stole a presidential election.

They violated our most basic and cherished right as Americans, our right to vote.
The American Revolution was begun over less.

"How came the king by a power which the people are afraid to trust, and
always obliged to check?"

Well, let's see.  He rigged voting booths in Georgia.  He had minorities kept
from voting in Tennessee.  And he had his brother, who as luck would have it
was the governor of Florida, have blacks detained so they couldn't vote and
have boxes of ballots thrown out and give old Jewish people a ballot so
confusing that it made them vote for a Nazi instead of Al Gore.

But none of that quite did the job.  So like a demented Russian chess champion,
George W. Bush shifted pieces around the board.

His next move was to have the Florida Secretary of State, who as luck
would have it was his brother's lover, certify an incomplete result in his favor.

And when that wasn't enough, he had James Baker, who as luck would have
it was his Daddy's best friend and advisor, go down there and manipulate the
legal system to keep thousands of votes from being counted.

But that pesky Florida Supreme Court just would not cooperate, so he
sent mobs of Republican operatives to physically assault elections
officials to scare them into not counting the votes.

But durnit, democracy just wouldn't roll over, so he had the United States
Supreme Court, who as luck would have it were in his pocket, rule that
Florida could not count its votes because it would do irreparable damage
to George W. Bush's candidacy.

Checkmate.

"By what means is such a corrupt and faithless court to be kept to its engagements?"

If one good thing has come out of this car wreck of an election, it is
that it may now be openly said that the Supreme Court is partisan.

The Republican majority on the Court or the Gang of Five, as they now
henceforth should be known -- ignored the law, disregarded the
Constitution, and threw out their cherished principle of States' Rights
to install the man they wanted in the White House.

The Supreme Court is a vital point in the triangle of checks and balances.
When the other branches abuse their power, the Court is supposed to step in,
uncorrupted by politics and guided only by the law, to set things right.
They are the keepers of the Constitution, the guardians of the rights our
Founding Fathers gave to us.

Once they have laid bare the ugly truth that their allegiance is not to the Constitution
and the law but to their own interests, what good are they to us?

"Until we consent that the sect of government in America be legally and
authoritatively occupied, we shall be in danger of having it filled by
some fortune ruffian, who may treat us in the same manner (as William
the Conqueror), and then where will be our freedom?"

Well, that horse has pretty well left the barn.  This has now come to pass, folks.

One of the chief causes of the American Revolution was taxation without
representation.  Considering how King George came by his office, isn't that
what we have now?  We have a President who was not elected, but in fact
appointed by the U.S. Supreme Court, and we have a Congress that refused
to fulfill its Constitutional obligation to question the legitimacy of this President.

We have paid our taxes, yet our will has been ignored and suppressed at
every turn, first by the Governor and Secretary of State of Florida,
then by "President" Bush, so-called, then by the Supreme Court, and
finally by the Congress.

This Congress has confirmed every one of Bush's extremist cabinet
appointees, even though he was not elected and therefore has no mandate
for such a conservative cabinet, passed a bankruptcy law to make it
easier for a credit card company to get their money than a mother to
collect child support, and now seems poised to pass Bush's wildly
irresponsible tax cut proposal.

We have paid our taxes; we have expressed our will.  Where, then, is
our representation?

"As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not
sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to
posterity:  And by a plain argument, as we are running the next
generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use
them meanly and pitifully."

"What will I tell my kids?"  How many times did we hear that phrase
from the lips of Republicans lambasting President Clinton for his
trysts with Monica Lewinsky?

Well, what will we tell them about what happened in Florida?  How will
we explain the behavior of our current "President" and the Supreme Court?
And how will we explain that not one senator would sign on to the Congressional
Black Caucas's request to debate the validity of the Florida electors?

How will we explain raiding the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge to drill for
what will be at maximum a six months' supply of oil?

How will we explain the billions of dollars of debt we leave them
because it was more important to give a tax break to Steve Forbes and
Ross Perot than to pay down the national debt?

And how will we explain if we don't fight to secure their right to vote?

"No man in his senses can say that their claim under William the
Conqueror is a very honorable one.  A French bastard landing with an
armed banditti, and establishing himself King of England against the
consent of the natives is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original."

I just threw that one in so I could compare George W. Bush to a French bastard.

"Though I would carefully avoid giving unnecessary offence, yet I am
inclined to believe that all those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation
may be included in the following descriptions. Interested men, who are not
to be trusted; weak men, who cannot see; prejudiced men, who will not see;
and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the European world
than it deserves; and this last class, by an ill-judged deliberation, will be
the cause of more calamities to this continent than all the other three."

This Republican party -- the same party who sold arms to terrorists,
impeached an innocent President to try to reverse the results of an
election, and now has suppressed the will of 48,000,000 Americans to
put their puppet king in the White House Ð this same Republican party
now talks of reconciliation, of a "new tone" in Washington, of "healing
the wounds of this election."

Milton said, "Never can true reconcilement grow, where wounds of deadly
hate have pierc'd so deep."  In other words:  Hey, GOP, if you want to
heal the wounds, pull the knife out of our backs, stitch up the gashes,
and apply a lot of ointment, will ya'?  Geez, any first-year med
student will tell you that.

As BartCop so often points out, let us give tax breaks to a bunch of
our friends regardless of the damage it does to the country.  Let us
spend 50 million dollars and six years investigating your boy, then
trump up a lot of phony charges and impeach him.
THEN we can talk about letting bygones be bygones.

Any Democrat who pursues reconciliation at this point is either worried
about their own re-election, and therefore cannot be trusted to fight
for us; or they are weak, and therefore incapable of fighting for us;
or they actually believe the Republican rhetoric of healing the wounds,
in which case they're stupid, and too na•ve to be of any use to us.
Pardon the expression, but how many times do you have to get screwed
before you learn not to bend that way?

"There are three different ways by which an independence may hereafter
be effected; and that one of those three will one day or other be the
fate of America, viz.  By the legal voice of the people in Congress;
by a military power; or by a mob."

Let me be very clear (and I hope the Secret Service pays special
attention to this):  I am not -- repeat NOT -- advocating violence in
any form.  But if the present gang-raping of the Constitution
continues, how long do y'all think it will be before somebody else
does?  What do they do in Haiti and Congo and Chechnya when their
rights are threatened?  They organize and take up arms.

This is supposed to be a nation of laws.  But when our elections
officials fail us, when the U.S. Supreme Court fails us, and when the
Congress fails us, what options are we left with?  How long will it be
before a People's Democratic Army of America pops up, drilling in the
woods of Montana and conducting raids on Federal buildings?

And don't think it's not already on some peoples' minds.  The following
is an excerpt of an article that appeared on Salon.com on January 4th:

Arson suspected in Bush boat blaze

Jan. 4, 2001 | AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- A blaze that destroyed a motor
boat owned in part by President-elect George W. Bush resulted from
arson, fire investigators said.

Last month's blaze, previously considered an accident, was set on board
the 22-foot Harris Kayot cabin cruiser, the state fire marshal's office
said Wednesday.

Fire marshal spokesman Mark Hanna said whoever set the fire knew the
boat belonged to the president-elect.

I know one thing:  under the present circumstances, Thomas Jefferson
would quite possibly approve.  "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is a natural manure."

I hope like hell it doesn't come to that.

"We have it in our power to begin the world over again."

When he wrote those words, Paine referred to casting off the tyranny of
a King, to creating a new form of government the world had never known,
government by the people, of the people, for the people.

They had to take up arms in 1776.  They had no alternative.  They had
no rights as Americans, no Constitution, no Voting Rights Act.

We have the means of redress our forefathers dreamed of.  We have by
birthright what they secured for us with their blood.  Let us not be so
ungrateful of that debt and unmindful of its precious value as to let
it slip away by degrees through laziness and inaction.

I've written my representatives several times now.  I'm going to a
Democratic organization meeting next week.  I'm going to donate money
to any Democrat who shows me he's standing up to the Republicans in a
meaningful way.

And I protested the Inauguration.  I flipped the bastard off.

What are you going to do?