And, Just In Case You Need Yet Another Reason To Get Out And Vote On Tuesday ...

... here's an incredibly important one:  there's a very good chance that the election will be a stolen one.

Because Republicans steal elections.  Especially presidential ones.

Yes, I said elections, not an election.  Everyone knows about 2000.  Bush, Gore, the hanging chads and the recount that was aborted by the Supreme Court, with the decision that began the Court's long decline into injustice.  I have no intention of re-hashing all of that here.  It's far too painful for me to even think about, especially since it almost certainly led to the 9/11 attacks, the loss of thousands of lives here and overseas, and a corrupting of our civil liberties that may never be reversed.

But here's something you may not know:  It wasn't the first time.

In 1980, the month before the presidential election that launched the current Reign of Error (and Terror), Jimmy Carter had an agreement with the Iranian government to bring home the hostages being held in the American embassy in Tehran.  There were rumors about it in the media, but it was in fact a done deal.  As a consequence, Carter's re-election prospects were strengthened.  Until suddenly, mysteriously, the deal fell apart, and the election momentum shifted in the direction of the Great Dissembler, Ronald Reagan.  The rest, as the say, is sadly irreversible history.

Except that the collapse of the deal, while sudden, was no mystery.  Rather, it was a blatant act of treason on the part of Reagan's campaign--and, for that matter, Reagan himself, assuming that he was in charge of his own campaign.  A covert deal between Republican operatives and the Iranians scuttled the deal that Carter had negotiated, with the promise that Tehran would get a better deal form a Reagan-led administration.  The Iranians agreed, the deal was scuttled, a good and decent man and the country he led were both betrayed, and we began our nightmare descent into nineteenth-century politics.

Oh, yes, and the Iranians got their better deal, It was called Iran-Contra.  Enough said.

Don't believe me?  Take a look here.  And then, once you've done that, take a look here, and realize that even Reagan's perfidy was not the first time.  In fact, it was a perverse case of history repeating itself.  And, both times, with all due respect to Tolstoy, tragedy rather than farce was the result.

How much additional suffering did the embassy hostages, their families and friends have to endure needlessly?  How much additional suffering did the people of Indochina have to endure needlessly?  Is it even possible to calculate the cost of this treachery to the American people?  In ruined lives?  In bankrupted businesses and governments?  In the very processes that give the word "democracy" whatever real meaning it has for us?

Remember this when you see video of Nixon declaring that he's not a crook.  Or Reagan, telling you that America is back.  Or Dubya, declaring "Mission Accomplished."

This election is not simply a debate between clashing philosophies.  It is a debate between one party that still recognizes philosophical differences and values democracy's ability to sort them out, and a party that has become a monster devoid of anything except an appetite for more power.

The choice is yours.  God help us all if you make the wrong one.  And, by "wrong one," I'm including staying at home.