In a 4,523-word commentary this morning, the editors of The New Yorker
have endorsed John Kerry for president. Their summary of all the many reasons underscores the
need to reclaim American democracy from the coup four years ago that turned the United
States into a right-wing banana republic.
After being installed as president by the U.S. Supreme Court following his loss
in the popular vote nationwide, George W. Bush took office with his minions and
proceeded to rule like the boss of an imperious junta. Instead of governing from the
center, which would have acknowleged their lack of a true mandate, they chose to exploit their
power without regard to the nation’s electorate and with no intention to heal its bitter
division.
“From the very day we walked in the building,” Vice President Cheney told Bob Woodward
in “Plan of Attack,” which the editors cite, “a notion of sort of a restrained presidency because it
was such a close election, that lasted maybe thirty seconds. It was not contemplated for any
length of time. We had an agenda, we ran on that agenda, we won the election — full speed
ahead.”
Won the election? Not by a long shot. Not even by a wolfish hair of his chinny-chin-chin.
The Supreme Court decision that halted the vote recount in Florida — where Bush’s
slimmest and most questionable of margins if overturned would have given Al Gore the
presidency — was “so shoddily reasoned and transparently partisan,” the New Yorker editors
write, “that the five justices who endorsed the decision declined to put their names on it, while the
four dissenters did not bother to conceal their disgust.”
The court ignored the usual “rules for settling electoral disputes of this kind, in federal and
state law and in the Constitution itself,” and thus installed Bush “by fiat,” which “made a
mockery not only of popular democracy but also of constitutional republicanism.”
It’s time to throw the junta bums out.
