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Fox News won't tell you this, but John Kerry, not George W. Bush, might be inaugurated in January after the impending Ohio recount.
The ultimate closer?
Although I've been mostly silent on it, I've been following the aftermath of the Nov. 2 presidential election where the struggle to have Americans', especially Ohioans', votes properly counted is concerned.
Where we stand right now is that the current, unofficial electoral vote count is 286 electoral votes for George W. Bush and 252 for John Kerry. (A presidential candidate needs 270 of the 538 electoral votes to win the White House.) The Nov. 2 election all came down to Ohio, which Bush "won" -- unofficially -- by 136,000 votes. The official vote counts from Ohio's counties are not due to the state until Wednesday, and then there most likely will be a statewide recount of Ohio as the result of a federal lawsuit filed by Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik and Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb.
If Ohio, with its 20 electoral votes, were to be determined to have been won by Kerry, not by Bush, that would change the electoral vote count to 266 for Bush and 272 for Kerry, making Kerry president. (See a detailed analysis of what could happen with Ohio here.)
Kerry is oft-noted for being a closer, for coming back from the dead right at the end of a campaign, as he did in January when he pulled a Lazarus and trounced crown prince Howard Dean in Iowa and New Hampshire for the Democratic presidential nomination.
If Ohio were to switch to Kerry's column and he were to be inaugurated in January, it would be his biggest close of his political career and one for the history books.
So far, the Kerry-Edwards campaign has done nothing to contest the election fraud in Ohio. (I say election fraud because interestingly, the voting irregularities that have been reported in Ohio and elsewhere throughout the nation disproportionately benefit Bush, not Kerry. If they were due solely to incompetence or computer malfunction or the like, there wouldn't be so many "mistakes" in Bush's favor.)
The Kerry-Edwards campaign doesn't have to lift a finger right now where Ohio is concerned, however; others are picking up the swords for them, such as Badnarik and Cobb, with their lawsuit to force a statewide recount; the Government Accountability Office, which is going to investigate voting irregularities that happened nationwide on Nov. 2; and the People for the American Way Foundation, which filed a lawsuit today to ensure that Cuyahoga County, Ohio counts the provisional ballots correctly so that no voter who used a provisional ballot is disenfranchised.
Several other organizations, such as blackboxvoting.org, are also all over Ohio election officials like stink on shit, as is Air America Radio's wonderful Randi Rhodes.
While the corporately controlled mainstream U.S. media aren't reporting it -- because they benefit from the Republican Party's and the BushCheneyCorp's pro-corporation, anti-people policies, and because they hate to report on complicated issues -- there is a below-the-radar groundswell regarding the legitimacy of the Nov. 2 vote, especially in Ohio. It's a zit that is gathering pus and could soon pop.
Many who voted for Kerry think that since Nov. 3 he has been like Al Gore, who pretty much rolled over and played dead in late 2000 while Team Bush, with a lot of help from the U.S. Supreme Court, stole Florida and thus the White House. While I have no insight into what Kerry is actually doing right now, I suspect that he is happily watching others go after Ohio elections officials on his behalf. If Kerry were to be front and center in the effort to ensure that Ohio isn't this year's Florida 2000, he would look like a sore loser. (Remember the "Sore Loserman" campaign that the anti-democratic, anti-vote-counting Republicans ran in late 2000?)
Kerry, I surmise, is wisely staying out of the limelight, watching and waiting, allowing everyone to think that George W. Bush's second term is inevitable, and then...
The strongest public statement that Kerry has made regarding the Nov. 2 election is like this one: "I will fight for a national standard for federal elections that has both transparency and accountability in our voting system. It's unacceptable in the United States that people still don't have full confidence in the integrity of the voting process."
That's politically astute; no one can criticize Kerry for calling for fair elections, but if he were to contest Ohio right now, it would be politically damaging. Americans just want their elections over and done with already so that they can get back to their reality television shows; whether or not their elections are actually conducted fairly and legally they aren't so concerned about, because ensuring fair and legal elections is, as Bush would say, hard work. (We Americans have boundless energy and resources, however, to ensure that democracy is practiced scrupulously in other nations, such as Iraq and Ukraine.)
Speaking of Ukraine, interestingly, Republicans, who are up in arms over alleged election fraud in Ukraine, are trying to prevent an Ohio recount.
This is from The Associated Press on Monday:
Keith Cunningham, director of the Allen County Board of Elections and incoming president of the Ohio Association of Election Officials, called the lawsuit [filed by Badnarik and Cobb] "frivolous," adding that he might mobilize counties to resist a recount.
"Commissioners are beginning to understand — and if they don't, will understand soon — what kind of financial impact this is going to have on them, in a year when elections already cost a great deal more than expected," said Cunningham, a Republican [emphasis mine].
The two former third-party candidates have said they raised more than $150,000 to cover the state's fee for a recount. Ohio law requires payment of $10 per precinct, or $113,600 statewide, but election officials say the true expense would be far greater.
LoParo has estimated the actual cost at $1.5 million.
I pose these questions to all Republicans: You're perfectly OK with billions and billions of American taxpayers' dollars going to Iraq to "democratize" that poor, beaten-down nation (beaten down first by Saddam Hussein and now beaten down by George W. Bush), but when it comes to ensuring that the democratic process in our own fucking nation is sound, you don't want to spend a fucking penny? And we liberals are the "traitors"? You oppose democracy for your own God-damned nation, and you're the "patriots"? No, you are fucking lucky that those of us who are true patriots let you live, that we fucking tolerate your blatantly anti-democratic bullshit. If we rise up, you are all dead fucking meat. (And you know that, which is why you are committing election fraud.)
I'm not OK with billions of our tax dollars going to "democratize" Iraq while treasonous, anti-democratic, anti-vote-counting Republicans bitch and moan about the cost of ensuring fair elections here at home. Memo to the Republicans: Where it comes to ensuring democracy and fair elections in the United States of America, money is no fucking object. (Of course, it's not really the cost of recounts that bothers Republicans; it's democracy and fair elections that really bother Republicans, and they're just using the cost of recounts as an excuse, because they can't say that they oppose democracy and fair elections.)
But I digress; back to the possibility that Kerry, not Bush, will be inaugurated in January: As much as we Kerry supporters would like to see Kerry sit in the Oval Office in January, it could be a case of be careful what you wish for.
President Kerry would inherit Bush's many messes, foreign and domestic.
President Kerry would be starting off with the largest federal budget deficit in the history of the United States of America, thanks to the war-profiteering Bush regime, which over the past four years wiped out the federal budget surplus that outgoing President Bill Clinton left behind him. So Kerry couldn't exactly start a slew of social programs. And the Bushwhacked economy could take years to ever reach its Clinton-era level again.
President Kerry also, of course, would have the quagmire in Iraq to sort out, which could take years. As one columnist put it after the Nov. 2 election:
...[N]o one appears to have any good ideas for fixing Iraq. In this sense, the Democrats have dodged a bullet ... by losing this election. If Kerry had won, he would have been blamed, given public perceptions of Democratic national security weakness, for the likely failure to secure Iraq. From the get-go, this was Bush's war of choice. It is only fair that he suffer the consequences of his own overreaching. If the Iraq adventure fails, or drags on interminably, he, and not Kerry, will suffer the ugly political fallout. And that is likely to come sooner rather than later. The Democrats will be around in 2008 to pick up the pieces.
Indeed, mopping up the Bush regime's many messes would take years, and the citizens of the United States of Amnesia would blame the lack of national progress on President Kerry, not on Bush, who deserves full credit.
That Republicans want Power By Any Means And At Any Cost might destroy the Republican Party in the long term. If Bush is inaugurated in January, without any checks and balances -- with a Republican in the White House, a Republican-dominated Senate and a Republican-dominated House of Representatives and more Republicans appointed to the federal courts -- things should get so bad in and for the United States over the next four years that in their unbridled power orgy, the Republicans will alienate a clear majority of American voters.
If Bush is inaugurated in January and the Republicans don't destroy the world along with their party during the next four years, the Democrats should win 2008 in a landslide.
2:48:41 PM 
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