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Danny Dayus - Many times over the last nine hours I’ve thought kindly of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have worked tirelessly over the past four years against the policies of the Bush presidency. To those people I must ask forgiveness for my siding with the world outside America. It is they, as well as the people who voted for Bush, who will have to bear the shame of belonging to a society that democratically elects war criminals to office. However, not all the world’s people will feel the same way. Many will see the election of George W Bush as a signal that America as a whole has chosen a course of confrontation and greed, and for a generation or more afterwards these people will teach their children to hate all that American society stands for.
Pepe Escobar, Asia Times - Whatever the result of the USA presidential election, at least half of the nation has already rejected Bush as a divider, not a uniter, someone who did not even have a popular mandate to begin with. Bush was not elected by the majority in 2000. If he is really elected now - with or without the majority of the popular vote - this will send a strong signal to the whole world that Americans support the neo-con agenda. The sequence is predictable: more corporate tax cuts, an even more repressive Patriot Act, more wars in the Middle East, more geopolitical chaos. The stakes couldn’t be higher. The crusading armies may legitimize “exporting death and violence to the four corners of the Earth”. Or progressive America may rejoin reality and punish the Bush administration for what it is: an illegitimate aberration.
Michael Saba - According to the American Center for Responsive Politics, spending on US elections this year will total almost $4 billion, including $1.2 billion on the presidential election. Just how much money is that and how much are the candidates spending per vote received? Almost half of the nations in the world have a Gross National Product, GNP (sum of all of the goods and services produced in a country in a year) of less than $4 billion a year. That includes countries like Zambia and Laos. Over 53 nations have a GNP of less than $1.2 billion a year. That group includes countries like Mauritania and Mongolia. Think about it. If we in America said money could no longer be used for funding a candidate’s election, we could use the money raised this year to fund almost half the world’s nations.
Serge Halimi - The polls in America next week will be as much a referendum on the current administration as an election. Bush has two rare, if not unique, distinctions: he was elected even though he received fewer votes than his opponent and he is the son of a former president. His enthronement was less democratic than dynastic. The election result conferred no particular mandate on him, and certainly no endorsement for a terrible leap to the right, an imperial inflection of the international order or the militarisation of American society and foreign policy. The Democrats prefer to attribute these dramatic shifts within the country to some “vast rightwing conspiracy” involving the media and the Supreme Court. But that ignores the way that President Clinton left behind him a party in disarray, without any clear plan and in a minority in the House of Representatives, the Senate and in the states.
Linda S. Heard - Let’s face it. Bush’s survival as president depends on America facing either real or imaginary enemies. The “Sept. 11 nineteen” were the ones who attacked but they are inconveniently dead. The eccentric Bin Laden served as the perfect personification of “evil” to oil the road to Kabul, only to be replaced by George W’s personal bogeyman Saddam Hussein, his father’s nemesis. So now that Saddam is watering plants in his jail between penning romance novels, another “evildoer” had to be paraded. This time, it’s the alleged one time Osama follower Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. There is some dispute as to whether he is actually alive and still sports a wooly balaclava, but the purveyors of fear are sure about one thing: He scoots around the so-called Sunni “Triangle of Death” planning his dastardly agenda amid women, children and babies.
Manuel Valenzuela - As much as America and the world wish to believe Florida will not be rigged with electoral fraud this November, the sad truth is that all the mechanisms needed to steal the state in favor of George Bush are already firmly entrenched. Thanks to Jeb Bush, Jim Crow manipulator of mandates, corrupt fraudster, decimator of democracy and brother of the president, and the Republican Party, which in essence controls the logistics of and the keys to running the election, Florida has already declared tens of thousands of voters, mostly black and Democratic, ineligible. Many more voters, of all creeds and colors, will be disenfranchised on election day, be it through intimidation, coercion, government intervention, criminal negligence, corruption and fraud, and, of course, through electronic voting machines, most of which are owned by staunch Republican supporters.
Milan Rai - Three years ago, Tony Blair presented a dossier to justify war on Afghanistan. The dossier concluded that, “The attacks of the 11 September 2001 were planned and carried out by Al Qaida, an organisation whose head is Usama Bin Laden… The attack could not have occurred without the alliance between the Taleban and Usama Bin Laden, which allowed Bin Laden to operate freely in Afghanistan, promoting, planning and executing terrorist activity.” President Bush said of the Taliban, “I gave them a fair chance.” However, a close examination of the events at the time shows that the USA and UK consistently brushed aside such opportunities for a nonviolent solution.
Omar Barghouti - De facto partition of Iraq is a bipartisan project. Today, rightist Republicans and Democrats speak of the “threat” of civil war dividing Iraq, and a recent report in the Financial Times, probably planted by Brits or Americans, is a variation on that theme. In the usual fashion, the paper quotes an “unidentified diplomat” as saying: “The south has been desperately disappointed, and they see Baghdad as continuing to leave them without representation. So they are working on ways to organize themselves to have more clout with the center.” In reality, civil war is the second item on the neocolonial wish-list. Should occupation of the whole of Iraq become untenable, they will foment inter-Iraqi strife in hopes of holding on to the oil-rich parts of the country through agreements with potentates of mini-states – sectarian and ethnic warlords, much like in Afghanistan.
Liz Burbank - The elections/"debates” expose the real purpose of electoral charades as major political WMDs of deception, delusion, distraction and a draft into a deadly trap. Of course we liberals hate those unjust, undeclared wars without end, those fascist attacks on our multicultural values and also on our sisters and brothers, the ‘right-wing’ suppression of ‘civil rights’ - all that nasty shit those republicans do - but what else can we do but elect a democrat, even if he’s saying the same things, we’ll go along with the program just til we get rid of Bush then we can get back to capitalist ‘business as usual’. We can make Kerry keep his promises. Oops. Well, we’ll do something later-- so let’s just not talk about it, OK? Ever wonder “how could they let german fascism happen”? We better look hard in the mirror. It ain’t pretty.
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