Marian Wilkinson distorts facts about President Bush and the Florida vote
Gerard Jackson
Like the vast majority of leftwing journalists the Bush-hating Marian Wilkinson cannot contain her political bigotry. In Four years on, the spotlight's back on Florida (Age, 2 October) she insinuated that the Republicans won the 2000 election by disenfranchising thousands of blacks in Florida.
Once again, let us do what phoney baloney journalists like Marian Wilkinson refuse to do and that is examine the facts. Long before the 2000 election it was recognized that Florida's voting rolls were in a terrible state. On major problem was voter fraud. The Miami Herald (1 February 1998) published the story of Manuel Yip who voted four times between 1993 and 1997. The remarkable think about Mr Yip is that he had been dead for nearly 8 years. (Needless to say, even in death Mr Yip proved to be a dedicated Democrat).
It was shenanigans like this that led the state government to try and reform the voter rolls before the 2000 election. A serious start was made in 1998. That mistakes were made in cleaning up the rolls is in indisputable. But to insinuate as Wilkinson did that thousands of blacks were disenfranchised is a despicable lie.
Of course, hardcore democrats never allowed the truth to get in the way of their lust for power. Hence we have the race-baiting Jon Corzine making the atrocious claim that "The GOP used voter intimidation and outright fraud to hand Florida to George W. Bush in 2000, and if we don't stop them, they'll do it again."
Kerry has been every bit as mendacious as his fellow Bush-hating partisan Dems. Addressing the National Baptist Convention on 9 September he falsely spoke of "a million African-American votes not counted, [and of] continuing acts of voter suppression…"
What Wilkinson did not tell her readers (there so much she doesn't tell) is that following the election there was a six-month investigation by the US Commission Civil Rights into the Florida charges. The Commission could find no evidence of voter intimidation or that black voters had been intentionally disenfranchised.
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division conducted its own independent investigation into the Dems' race-baiting charges of intimidation and disenfranchisement. It too found the charges to be without merit. In the words of Assistant Attorney General Ralph Boyd:
"The Civil Rights Division found no credible evidence in our investigations that Floridians were intentionally denied their right to vote during the November 2000 election."
No wonder our brilliant little Miss Marian Wilkinson did not cite a single source in support of her outrageous claim
What partisan Dems have done is deliberately confuse spoiled ballots with disenfranchisement. If they were right then Florida ballot-spoilage rates would exceed the national average. They did not. The average Florida rate for the 2000 election was 3 per cent while the average rate across the country ranged from 2-3 per cent.
If Wilkinson was sincere about being an honest journalist she would have pointed out that the counties in which the alleged disenfranchisement happened the county supervisors where Democrats with the sole exception of one independent.
The only attempt to disenfranchise any group was carried out by the Democratic Party against overseas military personnel. Gore and his squads of corrupt lawyers worked fanatically to deny these service personnel their democratic right to vote.
Mark Herron was one of the scumbags behind this rotten scheme to strip overseas personnel of their constitutional rights. Fortunately for the democratic process the memo in which he explained to Gore's anti-democratic lawyers how to invalidate military votes became public.
Being a bunch of power-hungry bigots hardcore Democrats are still trying to corrupt the voting process.
A field director for the Marxist Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now (ACORN) was reported by Florida Today of having admitted that the organisation was trying to fix votes for November election in order to put Kerry in the Oval Office.
Don't expect Wilkinson or any of her journalistic comrades to report on this matter. After all, in the same article in which she smeared Republicans over phoney disenfranchisement charges she also described People for the American Way (PAW) as being a "non-aligned" group. This is a brazen lie.
PAW is an extreme leftwing organization with an abiding hatred of Christianity. It was founded by Norman Lear, a Hollywood big shot and a particularly bigoted partisan Democrat.
Any honest journalist would have answered charges about Florida and Bush with the indisputable statement that Bush unequivocally won the Florida vote. But not our Miss Wilkinson.
Gerard Jackson is Brookes' economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 11 October 2004