...BY THE INTREPID INVESTIGATIVE bloggers at Sound Politics, I am increasingly convinced Christine Gregoire's Washington state gubernatorial victory is the product of incompetence so astonishing it strongly suggests outright fraud. The Wall Street Journal agrees. SP's work, which is updated constantly (and therefore should be viewed as a running thread) is available here; it is far and away the best resource for anyone who wants to keep up with this unfolding electoral outrage. WSJ's commentary is here.
I voted for Gregoire because I felt Washington's social safety net was at risk, but I nevertheless fervently believe there should be a re-vote, because under the circumstances, there is no way a Gregoire administration will ever have legitimacy in the eyes of a substantial majority of the state's electorate. Furthermore I am increasingly appalled by the smugly defiant Democrats who are in effect spitting in the faces of the 53 percent who believe the Seattle/King County Democratic machine stole the election from Dino Rossi; the Democrats are also giving the finger to the slightly larger percentage who want another election. And while I formerly believed Gregoire was a moderate, now because of her failure to repudiate these machine politics, I believe she is as dangerously radical as the Sea/King Democrats themselves, who are united behind Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Jim McDermott in the most stridently anti-American, most zealously matrifascist Democratic organization in America.
Hence I have changed my thinking: if the election is run again, I will vote for Rossi. Democratic dominance of the legislature guarantees Rossi cannot fulfill the omnipresent Republican goal of destroying the social safety net, and his presence in the statehouse is necessary to save us from the tsunami of anti-Second Amendment legislation that is a certainty now that the Sea/King machine has (by its gubernatorial coup) taken absolute and dictatorial control of the state Democratic Party apparatus. As I have noted before, it was a similar act of thievery, complete with voting corpses, that gave Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley total control of the national Democratic Party for nearly a dozen years after he stole the 1960 presidential election from Richard Milhous Nixon and presented it to John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
There is more than one moral here: the national reign of the Daley Machine eventually came to an end, and the eight-year destruction of the Democratic Party was one of the byproducts of the accompanying struggles. The riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention were merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg; the in-house battles were less violent but far more intense, though they were seldom reported save by Jack Newfield and a few others. By 1972, the Daley machine was vanquished everywhere but in Chicago proper, but in the resultant political vacuum the Democrats nominated George McGovern – one of their worst candidates ever – and Richard Nixon won re-election by a landslide. I make no claim to prophetic skill, especially in the crap-shoot of state politics, but I think it is likely Gregoire's refusal to stand for a re-vote will lead to a similar debacle for the Democrats in Washington, and it may even torpedo the party's burgeoning national effort to recover from the John Kerry candidacy.
Thank you, Loren, for recognizing that thuggery must not stand in Washington State. Thanks for the piece.
Posted by: Michele at January 17, 2005 11:04 AM