Lindsay Perigo
The Politically Incorrect Show - 11/12/2000
[Music - Die Fledermaus]
Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Monday December 11, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd., the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit, & excellence, against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.
[Music up, music down!]
And so it drags on, the race - or rather crawl - for the United States presidency. The 4-3 vote by the Florida Supreme Court to order manual recounts of votes that had already been machine-counted twice & failed to register a presidential vote was a blatantly political move by Democrat judges, & one that made the Chief Justice, himself a Democrat & author of one of the dissenting opinions, queasy. Quite simply, the Florida Supreme Court rewrote the voting rules after the election to change the outcome of it. Now the United States Supreme Court has put a stay on proceedings, pending a hearing tomorrow our time.
Gore supporters - the ones trying to cheat their man in - should reassure themselves that if Bush ends up in the White House, they won't notice much difference. On the issues that divided the two men - education, prescription drugs, Social Security - the differences between them were incidental, not fundamental. Theirs was an argument over not WHETHER government should be involved but just how much it should be involved & in what way.
Yet even these minor differences have been too much for some commentators. I have been amazed at the parade of pontificators on CNN who've been saying that the great thing about the closeness of this crawl is that whoever wins will have to forget the programme on which he campaigned & seek bi-partisan consensus every step of the way. The message from this election, say these commentators, is that people want government in effect of the middle by the middle for the middle. That's a stretch. Since half the electorate didn't vote, you could just as reasonably infer that the message from this election is: a pox on both of you. But that aside, I wonder what these middle-mongers imagine is the point of political parties in the first place? Isn't each one supposed to have a distinctive philosophy, the promotion & implementation of which is its raison d'etre? Isn't the whole point of a two- or multi-party system supposed to be that the parties WILL disagree with each other, & NOT form unofficial, cosy coalitions in the mushy middle & thereby create a de facto one-party state? Why is it suddenly a virtue to suppress all signs of a meaningful difference of opinion? Why is it the distinguishing feature of current mainstream politics that everyone is indistinguishable?
This, I submit, was NOT the way the system was originally intended; rather, it was designed so that any party could advocate any philosophy it liked. Whichever party won power would then be constrained by the Constitution as to what it could actually DO, but it would always be free to SAY what it pleased.
This latter-day taking fright at the mere suggestion of having a firm ideology, a set of principles which one is prepared to defend against all-comers, is the reason the candidates are so lack-lustre. The middle is indeed mush, & weasel-words its currency. Thomas Jefferson wouldn't stand a chance today. Few would recognise him, still fewer would understand him ... & CNN certainly wouldn't cover him.
In any event, all now hinges on the Supreme Court. Gush or Bore? Perhaps the Court should simply order them to take it in turns, week about. How would we know anyway?
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