Every community has a heart and soul. The heart and soul of the Democrats.com Community is our passion for freedom and justice - and our belief that George Bush and the Republican Party have systematically subverted both in the service of unfettered corporate power at home and naked imperialism abroad.
These are not abstract concerns to us, and they are fully supported by overwhelming evidence which we have meticulously documented since we began publishing in 2000.
We believe the elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen by Karl Rove and his operatives by disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of poor voters and by rigging electronic voting machines. The extent of these crimes is slowly becoming known through the investigation of the U.S. Attorney scandal.
We believe Bush and Cheney immediately filled the federal government with corporate executives who were given carte blanche to loot the federal treasury through massive tax cuts for the rich, huge no-bid contracts to Republican-run corporations, and the elimination of all regulations protecting workers and the environment. Halliburton is just the tip of the iceberg of these scandals, which were most obscene in Iraq and New Orleans.
We believe the Bush administration's imperialist policies were written by the oil giants in Vice President Cheney's secret Energy Task Force in 2001. We believe they seized on the 9/11 attack to act on their dream to turn Iraq into a massive, permanent U.S. military base in the heart of the Middle East so they could control the world's oil.
We believe Bush and Cheney created a police state at home by secret allowing the NSA to wiretap all Americans without a warrant and by enacting the USA Patriot Act to let the FBI seize all personal and business records without warrants. We believe the destruction of human rights in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo will ultimately come home with the destruction of human rights in the United States, as we are seeing with the Hamdi prosecution.
We believe the "War on Terror" is a smokescreen to conceal imperialism abroad and corporatism at home. We believe Islamist terrorists can be defeated through de-politicized intelligence work and close cooperation with foreign governments. We believe we must reach out to the Muslim world to expand prosperity and reduce hatred and hostility.
We believe Bush and Cheney have packed the Federal courts and the bureaucracy with "loyal Bushies" who will enforce Bush's corporatist and imperialist policies for years to come, even if we elect a Democratic President.
We believe the only way to restore freedom and justice is to:
- Bring our troops home from Iraq as soon as possible
- Impeach George Bush and Dick Cheney and prosecute them for their crimes
- Sweep all Republicans out of office in 2008
- Force the Democratic Party to repeal rightwing laws and policies and replace them with progressive laws and policies
We believe we cannot take freedom and justice for granted. We must fight every day to stop Bush, Cheney, and the Republicans from using the power of the government and the Corporate Media to turn us into corporate slaves. To win this fight we must be organized nationally, in 50 states, and in 435 Congressional Districts.
But our fight for freedom and justice is not at its heart a matter of politics. Politics is just a means to an end, and the end is freedom and justice in every sense of the word.
The Founding Fathers said it best in the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
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The Founding Fathers declared our most important freedoms in the Declaration of Independence:
- Life
- Liberty
- the Pursuit of Happiness.
They guaranteed these freedoms with the Constitution:
- Form a more perfect Union
- establish Justice
- insure domestic Tranquility
- provide for the common defence
- promote the general Welfare
- and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity
After dividing the powers among the three branches of government (Legislative, Executive, Judicial), they added ten specific amendments which they called the Bill of Rights:
- Freedom of assembly, speech and worship
- Freedom to bear arms
- Ban on forced housing of soldiers
- Ban on searches without warrants
- Basic rights for those accused of crimes
- Due process in all criminal trials
- Right to sue for civil damages
- Ban on cruel and unusual punishment (torture)
- This list does not exclude other rights
- Powers not given to the federal government remain with the states
From the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 to the Great Depression of the 1930's, these guaranteed freedoms made the United States one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world.
But in the 1930's, a political movement arose in direct opposition to freedom: Fascism. While it began far from the United States, Americans realized its continued spread would ultimately threaten freedom here. To stop the spread of fascism across the world, President Franklin Roosevelt articulated Four Freedoms in his 1941 State of the Union:
In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression - everywhere in the world.
The second is Freedom of worship. That is, freedom of every person to worship whomever (be it God, or any other deity/deities) in his own way - everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants - everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor - anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
At the end of 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II. After four long and bloody years, we defeated fascism.
As Americans, our freedoms reached a peak in the 1960's, which saw the fullest expression of our social and cultural freedoms. But the very expression of those freedoms created a backlash and unleashed a new wave of conservative authoritarianism in the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and ultimately George W. Bush.
The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 slowed the march of conservative authoritarianism. But it was a brief victory: in 1994, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh led far-right "Republican Revolutionaries" to power in Congress. From that moment on, President Clinton was under incessant attack, starting with the Federal government shutdown of 1995 culminating in the impeachment travesty of 1998.
The Stolen Election of 2000 was a watershed event for the members of Democrats.com. Al Gore won the popular vote by over 500,000 votes, but the requirement for an Electoral College majority meant the President would be chosen by the winner in Florida. On Election Day, Florida was simply too close to call. But instead of patiently counting all of the votes, the TV networks - led by FOX and NBC - declared George Bush the winner in the middle of the night. And from that moment forward, the entire Corporate Media treated George Bush as the President-elect and Al Gore as the sore loser - even though 175,000 machine-rejected votes had not been counted.
At first, the Bush campaign denounced the effort to resolve the dispute in court. But when the Florida Supreme Court ruled all 175,000 votes should be counted by hand, the Bush campaign immediately persuaded the 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court to overrule the Florida Supreme Court and bring an immediate halt to the state-wide manual recount.
The Democrats.com Community was born during the recount struggle. We "blogged" the recount battle long before the word "blogging" was invented. We organized online and in the streets with a single demand: "Count Every Vote." When the partisan Republican majority of the Supreme Court threw out 175,00 uncounted votes, we worked with the Congressional Black Caucus to challenge Florida's illegitimate electors in a scene made famous in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. But outgoing Vice President Al Gore ruled the challenge out of order, and George Bush moved into the White House on January 20, 2001 - amidst the largest anti-inaugural protests in history.
From that moment on, all of our core freedoms were under attack. Operating in secret, Vice President Cheney's Energy Task Force - comprised of the nation's largest energy companies - surveyed the energy supplies of the world and made plans for U.S. corporate domination of those supplies. Bush and Cheney ignored all warnings of an Al Qaeda attack inside the U.S., and Bush himself sat in a Florida classroom as four hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field en route to the Capitol.
Immediately after 9/11, Bush promised to get Osama Bin Laden "dead or alive." Bush invaded Afghanistan but let Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora. But capturing Bin Laden wasn't a real priority for Bush - he had much higher priorities.
Bush, Cheney, and their neocon appointees seized on the 9/11 attacks to plan a military expansion of the U.S. empire into the Middle East. Afghanistan was just a warmup exercise for the long-planned war in Iraq. The Bush Administration lied through its teeth for six months before launching an unprovoked and criminal War of Aggression in Iraq. Bush's invasion gave rise to an insurgency which has evolved into a civil war. But because Iraq has the world's second largest reserves of oil and sits between the oil fields of Saudi Arabia and Iran, Bush plans to keep the U.S. in Iraq forever.
Bush's imperial expansion was never popular at home. Before the invasion of Iraq, millions protested in the streets. To keep the anti-war movement at bay, Bush unleashed all of the police powers of the federal government through illegal NSA wiretapping and FBI surveillance of citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. Bush's assault on our freedoms at home was accompanied by naked fascism abroad in the form of torture, disappearances, and murder.
In 2004, Democrats across the country worked their hearts out to defeat Bush. But just as in 2000, the Corporate Media was entirely controlled by Karl Rove and the Republican spin machine. The Swift Boat Liars were given unlimited coverage on the cable news networks, convincing millions of Americans that John Kerry had actually shot himself in combat and awarded himself a Purple Heart. Once again the election came down to a single state - this time Ohio - and once again their were widespread accusations of disenfranchisement and voting machine fraud. But once again the Corporate Media declared Bush the winner and John Kerry chose to quit rather than fight to make sure every vote counted.
By 2006, the disaster in Iraq became clear to all Americans who were not drinking the Republican/FOX News kool-aid. Despite Karl Rove's best efforts to stop the electoral tsunami by rigging the elections (what he famously called "The Math"), Democrats won majorities in the Senate and House. But Democratic efforts to end the war have been blocked by Bush's vetoes and his lockstep support from Republicans.
Looking ahead to 2008, Democrats have a solid lead in the polls. But Republicans will run yet another expensive and vicious campaign, and their appointees will do everything they can to rig the results.
