The US' darkest hour

In a letter to the editor of Pravda, B. asserted that the Democratic Party in the United States "sat on its hands" while George Bush, with the help of his brother in Florida, stole the 2000 presidential election. It is certainly true that Bush was not elected to the post he now occupies.

Recently, many U.S. citizens have joined a movement whose aim is to force the federal government to appoint an independent prosecutor to inquire into allegations that Jeb Bush and his appointees violated the federal Voting Rights Act by purging voter roles before the 2000 election. The purge deliberately removed a disproportionate number of African-American voters from the roles, most of them erroneously. Despite this disenfranchisement of thousands of voters, Al Gore received more votes in Florida than did Bush. Gore is not in the White House today because five justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, three of whom had such close ties (through family members) to the Bush campaign that it was an absolute mockery of justice for them to fail to recuse themselves, decided to stop the recount of votes in Florida and to appoint Bush to the U.S. presidency.

As history sifts through all of this, it will come to be viewed as one of the United States' darkest hours.

More than one analyst described the Supreme Court's action as a judicial coup d'etat. That is exactly what transpired in 2000. I for one endorse the appeal made by the congressional black caucus to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to authorize international election observers to monitor the 2004 U.S. election. Interestingly, the Republican congress stifled this appeal by voting deleting from the official record the remarks of a congresswoman from Florida calling for such monitoring. Incredible? Yes. True? Absolutely.

Jeffrey A. Martin