This past Saturday, Washington Monthly blogger D.R. Tucker marked what for him was a very unhappy anniversary: it had been ten years since George W. Bush’s supposed “theft” of the 2004 presidential election, which Tucker alleged was “one of the worst criminal acts in United States history” and led to a sort of “mass murder” from the Iraq war and global warming.
Tucker described the scene around Faneuil Hall, where John Kerry was about to give his concession speech, as if it were the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings (“As long as I live, I will never forget the horror on the faces of the young people”) and wrapped up by asking rhetorically, “How can any rational person, regardless of ideology, deny that ten years ago today, George W. Bush, in essence, knocked down the towers of democracy?”
From Tucker’s post (emphasis added):
[Saturday was] the tenth anniversary of one of the worst criminal acts in United States history: President George W. Bush’s theft of the 2004 presidential election from Democratic Senator John Kerry.
On the afternoon of November 3, the day Kerry conceded the election (prematurely, as investigative journalists Brad Friedman and Greg Palast have long noted), I went to Faneuil Hall in Boston to see what the atmosphere was like outside of the building where Kerry would bury his dream…I will never forget the horror on the faces of the young people near the building. It was though they had just borne witness to a mass murder.
In a way, they did. Bush’s heist lead to the loss of more lives in Iraq, to say nothing of the countless lives lost thanks to additional four years of US non-leadership on global warming. No wonder those young faces were so heartbroken. They knew, instinctively, the deadly consequences of what had just happened…
Granted, Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama’s victory on the night of the heist was a positive development, considering what it would lead to four years later. Yet it can be argued that the gloom of November 2, 2004 has yet to dissipate. Voting rights are still being imperiled, as Friedman has courageously chronicled. The right-wing interests that supported the Bush-Cheney administration still have an iron grip on our politics and media entities. The American electorate can still be manipulated to vote a certain way based on fear and hate. From a certain perspective, it seems as if time stopped on that demonic day.
Whenever progressives note how illogical the political right has become, conservatives often point to the “Truthers”—the folks who think that 9/11 was an inside job—as a prominent example of lunacy on the left. Of course, “Truthers” never actually had political power on the left, but how can any rational person, regardless of ideology, deny that ten years ago today, George W. Bush, in essence, knocked down the towers of democracy?
