[Mb-civic] MUST READ: Harpers Magazine - None Dare Call It Stolen

[Mike Blaxill]

This is the full text of Harpers Magazine article
by Mark Crispin Miller.  This is a must read for
anyone who hasn't seen it already...


None Dare Call It Stolen
Ohio, the election, and America's servile press
By Mark Crispin Miller.

Whichever candidate you voted for (or think you
voted for), or even if you did not vote (or could
not vote), you must admit  that last year’s
presidential race was—if nothing else—pretty
interesting. True, the press has dropped the
subject, and the Democrats, with very few
exceptions, have “moved on.” Yet this contest may
have been the most unusual in U.S. history;  it
was certainly among those with the strangest
outcomes. You may remember being surprised
yourself. The infamously factious Democrats were
fiercely unified—Ralph Nader garnered only about
0.38 percent of the national vote—while the
Republicans were  split, with a vocal anti-Bush
front that included anti-Clinton warrior Bob Barr
of Georgia; Ike’s son John Eisenhower; Ronald
Reagan’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
William J. Crowe Jr.; former Air Force Chief of
Staff and onetime “Veteran  for Bush” General
Merrill “Tony” McPeak; founding neocon Francis
Fukuyama; Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, and
various  large alliances of military officers,
diplomats, and business professors. The American
Conservative, co-founded by Pat Buchanan,
endorsed five candidates for president, including
both Bush and Kerry, while the Financial Times
and The Economist came out for Kerry alone. At
least fifty-nine daily newspapers that backed
Bush in the previous election endorsed Kerry (or 
no one) in this election. The national turnout in
2004 was the highest since 1968, when another
unpopular war had swept the ruling party from the
White House. Yet this ever-less-beloved
president, this president who had united liberals
and conservatives and nearly all the world
against  himself—this president somehow bested
his opponent by 3,000,176 votes.

How did he do it? To that most important question
the commentariat, briskly prompted by
Republicans, supplied an answer. Americans  of
faith—a silent majority heretofore unmoved by any
other politician—had poured forth by the millions
to vote “Yes!” for Jesus’ buddy in the White
House. Bush’s 51 percent, according to this
thesis, were roused primarily by “family values.”
Tony  Perkins, president of the Family Research
Council, called gay marriage “the hood ornament
on the family values wagon that  carried the
president to a second term.” The pundits eagerly
pronounced their amens—“Moral values,” Tucker
Carlson said on  CNN, “drove President Bush and
other Republican candidates to victory this
week”—although it is not clear why. The primary 
evidence of our Great Awakening was a
post-election poll by the Pew Research Center in
which 27 percent of the respondents,  when asked
which issue “mattered most” to them in the
election, selected something called “moral
values.” This slight plurality  of impulse
becomes still less impressive when we note that,
as the pollsters went to great pains to make
clear, “the relative importance of moral values
depends greatly on how the question is framed.”
In fact, when voters were asked to “name in their
 own words the most important factor in their
vote,” only 14 percent managed to come up with
“moral values.” Strangely, this  detail went
little mentioned in the post-electoral
commentary.

[Full text of article here - click on to the link
below]
http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html