Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Senators, Will You Certify What You Cannot Verify?

I hope but don’t dare to expect that at least one Democratic Senator will join the brave and principled Democratic Representatives who are contesting the 2004 election tomorrow on the basis of the rampant, deliberate, systematic disenfranchisement of American citizens, the egregious and disgusting abuses of the democratic process best-documented in Ohio but reported elsewhere as well.

Senators, how can you certify a result you cannot verify? How can you invoke democratic ideals in your speeches if you refuse to defend our embattled democracy itself when the moment demands it?

If you imagine that you can horse-trade your craven silence for favors with unprincipled Repugnicans (ah, to be a fly on the wall to hear the lies and threats that are flinging back and forth across the District right about now!) imagine instead the power you gain chipping away at the faux mandate of an executive who was never elected to office but was always only selected into power by first the deeply compromised judiciary and then the unbalanced hysterically partisan legislative branches....

Stop struggling to partner with these hooligans and fight for the people you represent! Stop struggling to give a figleaf of respectability to their obscenities by observing the forms as they dismantle them around you.

If you have convictions it is time to show the courage of those convictions. Draw the attention of the conservative sleepwalking corporate media to the unprecedented outrages of this election by doing something unprecedented yourselves. Begin to prepare the groundwork for the real fights to come by acting the part of a true opposition party. Do the right thing and America will swell the ranks of Democrats in Congress to reward you next election. Then we can begin again to do the work of democracy aright.

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