Sore Losers

Yeah, the post title is reference to the feckless leadership of the Democratic Party, as you've probably already guessed. But first, let's talk briefly about retiring Raiders quarterback Rich Gannon, who sustained a broken neck in the third game last season, and is just now finally facing reality and leaving the game.

Let's just say there's a lesson here.

Rich Gannon's mind, his arm, his legs and his heart desperately wanted this to be the beginning of his 19th year in the NFL.

His injured neck, with a fragile vertebra still mending following a vicious helmet-to-helmet tackle in Week 3 of the 2004 season, conspired to end his rags-to-riches football career before he was ready.

So Gannon, the fiery four-time Pro Bowler and 2002 NFL Most Valuable Player, reluctantly but officially closed the book on his playing days Saturday before a crowd of teammates, coaches and friends during an emotional ceremony at the team's training headquarters in Napa.

"As far as the decision to retire, it was an easy one for me. It really was not my decision," said Gannon, 39, who has signed with CBS Sports as a game-day analyst for their NFL broadcasts and has other television and radio opportunities before him. "I'm not able to continue to play physically, and that really takes all of the guesswork out of it.

"For a player like myself, who still feels that he's got enough left in his tank and enough left in his arms and legs to continue to play, unfortunately, my neck will not allow me to continue my career."

....

Raiders owner Al Davis saw the quarterback's upwardly mobile career track mimic that of the team, as Oakland progressed from 8-8 in 1999 under coach Jon Gruden to 12-4 in 2000, then 10-6 in '01 -- the year of the "Tuck Rule" playoff loss at New England -- to 11-5 and a Super Bowl berth in '02 under coach Bill Callahan.

"That's what I mean by work ethic." Davis said "Who hurts when you lose, who it really, really bothers them when you lose. And I think (Gannon) is a sore loser. But so am I. And so were the great quarterbacks -- sore losers. I think you have to be that way." [emphasis mine]

Amen. As absurd as it may sound at first blush, I believe that the solons of the Democratic Party could take a page from Rich Gannon's book. What exactly have they gained by brooking compromise with those who actively, publicly, and consistently seek their destruction as a viable political opposition? Not a goddamned thing, that's what.

The Democrats are so damned busy putting on their painfully earnest game face, to try to win back the defectors from 2000 (and by that, I don't mean the few percent that went for Nader, I mean the much greater number of people who jumped over to Bush because they bought into that "compassionate conservative" horseshit), that they have forgotten about the people who've stuck with them.

I'm sick of fence-straddlers like Dianne Feinstein cynically endorsing flag-burning amendments every time she's up for re-election (she did it last time too, which is why I voted for Tom Campbell); either you are for the free expression of speech, or you're not -- not to mention the obvious fact that a flag-burning amendment is the answer to a question nobody with any sense of priority or proportion is even asking. Joementum Lieberman is another example of a gutless shill who refuses to just step up and tell idiots like Rick Santorum and Tom Coburn to just fucking get bent already.

Back to Rich Gannon. Here's a guy who wants to win so fucking bad, he wanted back in after breaking his neck. Okay? And keep in mind, Gannon was actually drafted by New England as a defensive back. Once again, here is a guy who wants to win so bad, he's willing to learn a whole new skill set so he can get in and contribute. He's literally sacrificed his health and jeopardized even his very ability to physically move around.

Gannon didn't break his neck on some fluke play, either -- in the Tampa Bay game last year, as the Raiders neared the goal line, Gannon scrambled right up the middle and lowered his head as Tampa Bay linebacker Derrick Brooks lowered his to make the tackle. Gannon frequently did this sort of thing anyway, but in this instance he had extra motivation, as it was an opportunity to stick it to former Oakland coach Jon Gruden, who had gone on to Tampa Bay and thwarted Gannon's sole attempt at winning a Super Bowl.

Whether you're a football fan or not, you at least have to appreciate the fact that DiFi or Lieberman will never stick their necks out for their team, no matter how many times the other team taunts them and makes them suck on it. For a creature like Lieberman, to actually take a risk would be to invite Joeblivion. I'm sure he thinks he's pulling some martial-arts shit, using the opponent's force against him, but it doesn't work that way. There's simply no room in 4GW politics for Joejitsu.

Politicans and their hangers-on will respond that this is not football, this is life, and thus the stakes are infinitely higher. I say that that's precisely why they should be willing to give it all they've got. The time for the old gutless standby of politics being the "art of the possible" is past. This is the new millennium, baby, and if you don't get that Iraq is not the only milieu which uses fourth-generation warfare, then fucking go home already and let someone have your political seat who is willing to fight. Let me have that Senate seat -- I'll tell Rick Santorum to suck my cock before I lend his medieval thought patterns any credence just for the sake of bipartisan comity. Fuck that shit.

Seriously, people are abuzz at how Paul Hackett's near-miss in Ohio is damned near equivalent to an upset, in terms of political momentum. I agree, but I also think that the powers that be need to take the proper lesson from Hackett's campaign, and look at specifically what he brought to it. Fire. Passion. The resonance of rightness, as Robert Fripp once referred to it. Hackett never watered down the visceral nature of his argument for the sake of fake civility. He called Bush an SOB because Bush is an SOB; he called Bush and his lackeys chickenhawks because that is exactly what they are.

Hackett has demonstrated what Howard Dean demonstrated before him, before Dean got derailed by the orchestrations of a callow and bored "free press" -- indeed, the Republicans have been demonstrating it for a good decade now. Passion and anger, properly directed, can be very useful and constructive, and despite the false cries for civility, it's what people want in these polarized times.

Sometimes it takes those intangible qualities to find that fabled "fire within", and stand up resolutely for what the fuck you believe in, without worrying about what all the focus groups and NASCAR dads and security moms will think. You know what they'll think? They'll think you mean what you say, that they can count on you, that your word means something, that their successes and failures are your successes and failures.

Let's take a look at a story which is resurfacing as of late, a story which epitomizes the failure of the Democrats to function as a viable opposition. Let's talk about Ohio.

Like a lot of people in this country (and like most all of my colleagues in the journalism world), my instinctual reaction to the Ohio electoral-mess story has always been one of revulsion and irritation. Almost on principle I had refused even to look at any of the news stories surrounding the Ohio vote; there is a part of me that did not want to be associated with any sore-loser hysteria of the political margins, and in particular with this story, the great conspiratorial Snuffleupagus of the defeated left.

It had always seemed to me that I understood the psychology of the Ohio story without having to examine the facts involved. I thought the story appealed most directly to a group of people who were still reeling after 2000, an election which George W. Bush not only lost according to the popular vote, but plainly stole in the electoral college. The evidence for this theft has been there for everyone to see for five years now; few serious thinkers even dispute the matter anymore, just as few Democrats would even bother denying now that John Kennedy stole the 1960 election.

Yet, Bush remains president. And not only has he remained president, he hasn't even had the decency to act embarrassed about it. He's remained president right out in the open, in front of our faces, like he's proud of that shit.

For a certain segment of the population, this state of affairs must have been psychologically unacceptable....Ohio, it always seemed to me, was a wish their hearts made.

I think most of the people who voted for Kerry, not just those mythical monolithic "leftists", had similar sentiments. The 2004 campaign was exhausting, for the spectators as well as the participants, and in defeat, the anti-Bush crowd's last best fading hope was that if they didn't squawk too much about some of the more egregious shenanigans, the lame-duck Bushies might be a bit gracious in victory.

We can all see how that worked out for us. If this administration has a motto, it's "Suck On It". Not sure how that would translate in Latin -- "E Pluribus Suckum", maybe.

That in itself didn't make the Ohio story illegitimate. It did, however, make it something I wanted to avoid precisely because I disliked George Bush. On some level I suspected that the more publicity the Ohio mess got, the more discredited Bush's political opponents would be in the end. The media, I knew, would dismiss the Ohio story in exactly the casually vicious manner described above—as hysteria, as the delusional work of professional conspiracy theorists, as the behavior of sore losers unable to accept George Bush's clear popular victory.

That last part, incidentally, was the formulation most journalists used when picking their official excuse for ignoring the '04 Ohio story. Because Bush really did win the popular vote, they argued, there was no point in investigating a possible electoral fraud in Ohio, because no one had really been cheated out of office.

That idea allowed the media simply sidestep the entire issue, and escape having to make a pronouncement about the legitimacy of the Ohio elections—something they seemed hell bent on avoiding.

Even when they had a completely plausible excuse to at least investigate the Ohio charges on their own—after Michigan congressman John Conyers issued a lengthy report detailing the Ohio indiscretions—the big dailies still blew off the case. The New York Times mentioned the Conyers report only in the context of a 381-word page A16 item in January about John Kerry endorsing the election results ("Election Results to Be Certified, With Little Fuss From Kerry," 1/16/05). That piece ended with a quote by Dennis Hastert, who dismissed the Conyers report as the work of the "loony left."

Here Taibbi gets to what I really think is the crux of the biscuit -- the media's complicity in all this simply cannot be ignored anymore. Whether passive or active, the sheer disregard for prioritizing facts, for caving to political pressure, for just being fucking lazy and indifferent to the truly important stories that affect the very ability of this nation to continue to function as a true representative democracy -- all of it, it's just unforgivable. It's pathetic that people sitting in their rooms, most probably only half-clothed, with Winamp blaring, typing for free, are frequently doing better and more consistent work than overpaid hacks like Leslie Blitzer.

All the media needs to do is make an honest effort to uncover and report facts -- if there's nothing to the Ohio stories, then make that the story. But there's an awful lot of somethings to it, and now that both the Democrats and the media are finally starting to figure out that they will never win with the neocons and theocons, no matter how much they capitulate, they have nothing left to lose by just sifting through the wreckage.

Here's the thing about Ohio. Until you really look at it, you won't understand its significance, which is this: the techniques used in this particular theft have the capacity to alter elections not by dozens or hundreds or even thousands of votes, but by tens of thousands.

And if we ignore this now, we're putting proven methods for easily ripping off major elections in the hands of the same party that had no qualms whatsoever about lying its way into a war in Iraq. In the hands of a merely corrupt political party, a bad election or two would be no big deal. But these clowns we have in power now imagine themselves to be revolutionaries, and their psychology is a lot like that of the leadership of Enron, pre-meltdown—with each passing day that they get away with it, they become more convinced by a delusion of righteousness.

Obviously people who have followed this story before know the basic facts already, but for those who ignored Ohio until now, here's a very brief greatest hits of Ohio irregularities:

• As was the case in Florida, the secretary of state (Kenneth Blackwell, in Ohio), who is in charge of elections, was also the co-chair of the state's Bush-Cheney campaign.

• In a technique reminiscent of the semantic gymnastics of pre-Civil Rights Act election officials, Blackwell replaced the word "jurisdiction" with "precinct" in an electoral directive that would ultimately result in perhaps tens of thousands of provisional ballots—votes cast mainly by low-income residents—being disallowed.

• Blackwell initially rejected thousands of voter registrations because they were printed on paper that was, according to him, the wrong weight.

• In conservative, Bush-friendly Miami County, voter turnout was an Uzbekistan-esque 98.55 percent.

• In Warren county, election officials locked down the administration building and prevented reporters from observing the ballot counting, citing a "terrorist threat" (described as being a "10" on a scale of 1 to 10) that had been reported to them by the FBI. The FBI made no such report. Recounts conducted during this lockdown resulted in increased votes for Bush.

• In Franklin County, 4,258 votes were cast for Bush in a precinct where there were only 800 registered voters.

And so on. There are dozens more such glitches, which taken together suggest that the exit polls in Ohio, showing Kerry the victor, were probably accurate. But this is just a primer. More facts next week, plus an interview with Sherrod Brown—and a guide to what to do next.

I dunno. If I were a professional journamalist with corporate resources at my disposal, I would look at Taibbi's brief laundry list and find several things worth looking into. If I were an elected representative in the Democratic Party and I saw this list, I would want to launch an investigation -- and if I were repudiated in this effort by my Republican brethren, I would want to use whatever powers and status my office had to make sure every media outlet I could find publicized that fact, as well as the list itself.

John Kerry had that opportunity right after the election. Reports had come in about the Gahanna precinct machines tallying several thousand votes for Bush, in a precinct with only a few hundred total registered voters. Kerry had about $15 million left in his legal fund -- money that was there specifically to prevent another Florida. But Kerry allowed himself to be cowed by the Republican douchebags and the shitbirds in the punditocracy. He allowed himself to be intimidated by cheap assertions that "nobody" wanted a repeat of 2000, that he shouldn't be a "sore loser".

Well, bullshit. He should have been a sore loser; he should have been the sorest motherfucker on the planet. He got jobbed in Ohio, the way Gore got wilded in Florida in 2000. The Democrats have permitted themselves to be tempered by sneers of "get over it". They've actually tried to "get over it". This "let's come together for the sake of the country" shit is nice and all, but it's gotten them exactly bupkis.

Do they seriously think that if the tables had been turned, that Gore had gotten the nod in 2000 instead of Bush, that the GOP would have "gotten over it"? Are you fucking kidding? These people are sore winners -- what kind of losers do you think they are?

The Republican Party has done a bang-up job in fracturing the cohesiveness of the Democratic Party, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way. Either they decide to stick up for themselves, for their constituents, for their core principles, or they continue to allow themselves to be pushed around for the sake of temporary political expediency. And it is temporary; the fact that they brazenly spent the first half of 2005 trying to dismantle Social Security (and lie about it) demonstrates quite clearly that if the Republicans can't get the government small enough to drown in the bathtub, they'll settle for doing it to the Democrats.

And they'll start with the ones that helped them the most, so I hope DiFi and Joementum can breathe underwater.