So....What Happened To The Truth? : The Crushed Optimism of a Young Republican.

11-17-2004

Author’s note – to all you Progressives reading this, please bear with me as I quote the Bible: all people who go to church aren’t 15^th-Century Witch Burners, and it helps me to make my point.  To all you church-goers reading this, please bear with me as I quote the Bible:  it may make you question some things you haven’t thought about in a while, and it helps me to make my point. 

"I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians.  Your Christians are not like your Christ." --Ghandi

I am, and have always been, a registered Republican.  I grew up in a Republican family in a Republican area, and went to church every Sunday with other southern white Republicans.  I went to a private Lutheran College in NC.  Growing up, we had Boy Scouts, and bake sales, and school plays with lots of other white Republican families.  We didn’t hang around white kids because we were racist, that’s just all there were.  Race didn’t matter, at least not to the kids - I did have black friends.  Uhh, 2 of them, in fact.  They actually used to come over to my house all the time, which was kind of a rarity in the White-Bread world I grew up in.  They really were two of my best friends, Kevin and Lynette - they were the black kids in the neighborhood, and exposure to their family taught me everything I knew about Black culture up until High School, where I met different Black kids, who taught me that being a teenager can really suck.  I started to realize that we were sheltered then, but it wasn't until much later that I realized exactly how sheltered we were, and how much went on that we didn't have to see.

You know… looking back, it was really a great time.  I wish I could go back to those simpler times.  Sheltered childhoods are great when you can get them, but there is the unfortunate side effect of not knowing what is really going on in the world and what really takes place behind the scenes, and that can stick with one until well past voting-age.  Jaded New Yorkers will laugh at my naïve optimism and basic beliefs that people are good, and that they usually do the right thing just because, well, it’s The Right Thing.  That’s OK - Let them laugh.  It looks like they may be right, and honestly, I don't care anymore.

In recent years I've started paying more attention, and it really has me yearning for the days of bake sales and Boy Scouts.  What I see aren't the good, moral Republican Church leaders I remember from my youth, who always said things like "Doing the right thing is its own reward", and "Judge not, lest ye be judged" (Luke 6:37).  Now my Republican leaders are a bunch of thugs, intimidating and ridiculing people who disagree with anything they do, which unfortunately includes people like me, who remember what the Republican party once stood for.  It's really made me pay more attention to the left wing and see what they're saying.  Take this last Presidential campaign - I watched while both sides went negative, but my side went EXCLUSIVELY, almost gratuitously negative.  All we did was mock and make fun of the Democrats and Kerry, which let us avoid real issues.  As a Republican, Bush's record troubles me, but this was ignored in the effort to smear Kerry, a decorated war hero, and his supporters, also a bunch of decorated war heroes, as traitors to their country.  We smeared a Vietnam Vet (Max Cleland) in a wheelchair with one arm and no legs as a traitor to his country. 

Huh?  Is that the right thing to do?  Last I heard, Jesus healed the crippled (excuse me - Handicapable), he didn't slander and mock them.  What happened to us?  How did we get here?  This is the party who is supposed to be the "Moral Majority", who has gotten so entwined in religion that the two are nearly synonymous, who preach the teachings of Jesus to anyone who will listen, and many who won't.  But we're not living it.  Would Jesus make fun of Veterans disabled in a war He  had skirted his duty to fight (He also had strong paternal connections, by the way), but which He supported?  That doesn’t sound like the Jesus I know.

No, Really, What Would Jesus Do?

Let's look at our WWJD bracelets and bumper stickers and really ask ourselves if we're really doing What Jesus Would Do:

Help me out here, ‘cause I’ve been looking ... where in the Bible does Jesus say "Bring ‘em on"?  Where do Jesus and his pals make Billions of shekels by choking off industry and competition in no-bid contracts in Babylon?  And where in the Bible does Jesus ridicule those with different points of view?  I read the "eye for an eye"(Exodus 21:24) part, but what about the "Love thy neighbor"(Matthew 19:19) part, and the "turn the other cheek"(Matthew 5:39) part, and the "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"(The Golden Rule) part?  What about the "it's easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than a rich man into heaven"(Matthew 19:24) part?  Our President and Vice-President are both oil multi-millionaires, and you don't get there by helping people.  What about the "how you treat the least of my children is how you treat me"(Matthew 25:45) part?  We have 45 million uninsured people in the US.  Why?  Do we need the money so badly that we can't take care of each other?  We already spend twice as much per person on healthcare as Canada does.  It doesn't have to be this way.  Remember the African Proverb "It takes a village to raise a child"?  It doesn't say "It takes a village to watch other people's children starve while the villagers cut after-school programs and watch reality TV on their new big-screens, paid for by the new Tax Cuts".

You know, there really is more to the Bible than "striking down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who seek to destroy and poison my brothers."(Ezekiel 25:17)  I read that part, too, and it even showed up in a movie!  But let us remember that in that verse, God is the one doing the striking, not a man.  Look, George W. Bush is not the Holy Sheriff.  George Bush is Barney Fife, and I wish he would put his bullet back in his shirt pocket and go back to his fake-ass Dude Ranch in Crawford.  Religion is important to people all over the world, but we should all know by now that it makes very poor public policy.  Religion and Government DO NOT MIX!  Church-Run Day Care Programs are great, but never forget that 9/11 was a Faith-Based Initiative, too. 

So whose teachings are we following?  God did not tell us to kill over 100,000 innocent Iraqis.  God told us to care for each other, and love each other, and spread peace.  Is that what we're doing?  We have been baited into a religious war with Islam, and our President even called it a "crusade".  Do we Christians want to go back to the time of the crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, where we killed hundreds of thousands of people in order to "save" them?  Couldn't we just give them a pamphlet and maybe invite them to the church cookout, instead of going back to the days of burning them at the stake?  They seem nice, or would be, if we’d just stop bombing them for a few minutes and get to know them a little better.  That DOES tend to make people a little cranky, you know.

“We Are Bringing Democracy to the World” --GW Bush 

“Hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine eye, and then thou wilt see clearly to cast out the speck out of the eye of thy brother” –Matthew 7:5

What has brought this to a head for me is our last election, which, despite the dismissals by Diebold and others, really does look like it was stolen.  "But your side won!" I hear you say.  Yes, we won, but there is no honor in winning this way.  I'm pretty sure I could whip anybody in chess if my friends snuck in and took my opponent's queen and bishops away, but even though I had the trophy and cash prize, I don't think I'd feel very good about it.  You’re not a bad-ass street fighter if your friend kicks the wheelchair out from under the Vietnam Vet you’re fighting so you can kick him in the teeth while he’s down.

This is no wild “conspiracy theory”, by the way.  I’ve done a great deal of research – it’s on my site and many others.  It really does look like the 2004 election was stolen.  By us.  There's a ton of solid statistical analysis going on about it, as well as conspiracy theories and reports of voter fraud.  In an effort to debunk some of these conspiracy theorists (denial dies hard), I accepted the challenge of Bev Harris, founder of BlackBoxVoting.org to help audit the software used in our elections and determine if the security of the GEMS Voter Tabulation Software was as bad as the conspiracy theorists were saying that it was.  Know what I found out?

It wasn't that bad, it was WORSE.  The design was poor, the development was poor, the implementation was abysmal.  I was able to hack in to one of my own computers running Diebold's GEMS vote tabulation software, change over 11,000 votes, and get out leaving no trace in a little under 5 minutes.  I went from thinking everything was pretty much OK to having absolutely NO confidence that the voter's will was done in the span of about 1/2 hour.  Any number of parties could have stolen this election, from poll workers to election officials to Diebold employees.  Remember Diebold, whose CEO in 2003 promised to do everything in his power to bring Ohio's electoral votes to President Bush in 2004?  Yeah, they’re the ones who built the systems. 

Remember, Enron was a “conspiracy theory”, too.  Where the people they stole from “Sore Losers”?

Delving deeper into this depressing development, I found that Diebold is not exactly a company to be trusted.  Visions of Enron danced in my head as I learned that no less than 5 of their software developers are convicted felons, including one, Jeff Dean, who was convicted of 23 counts of Felony Theft in the First Degree (Case # 89-1-04034-1) in Washington State by - get this - installing backdoors into software he had written.  These are the people who designed and developed the software used to tabulate Tens of Millions of our votes.

Let me sum this up - we have extremely insecure and poorly designed software, written by convicted felons, poorly and restrictively tested, distributed by a company with a known strong partisan bias, deployed insecurely, with many of the systems incapable of producing a paper ballot that can be used in the event of a hand recount. 

These same systems, decertified by California, were used in 37 other states.  These systems were not tested as they should have been, and ALL independent tests performed have called the lapses in security "stunning", "blinding", and said things like "if my beginner students handed in this software, they would receive an F". 

And less than one year after Diebold's CEO pledged to do everything he could to help the GOP win, there are overwhelming (and strange) election results for the party who he publicly favors!  This of course, despite exit polls and strong indicators pointing the other way, towards a Democratic win and swing in power.  Is that a coincidence?  Even I”M not naïve enough to believe that!  I've been involved in Computer Security for too long to believe in coincidence.  If it can be hacked, it will be hacked.

And like Watergate and Enron, some conspiracy theories turn out to be true.

Republicans - Are our policies so weak that we have to resort to this?  Is this really what we have become?  I have tested this software myself, and posted the results at www.chuckherrin.com/hackthevote.htm.  You can simply follow the steps and screenshots and modify thousands of votes yourself - this is not hearsay, rumor, or innuendo – try it!  Look at the time stamped audit logs and the "Official Results" showing over 11,000 changed votes.  This is fact.  You don't have to believe me, either.  Thanks to Diebold leaving a web server open to the public, the GEMS software and sample databases are all over the web.  Download them and try it yourself.  Seriously – you don’t have to believe a word I say, as long as you just try it yourself.

If you’ve seen it or tried it:  I know what you're feeling.  I didn’t want to believe it either.  I still don’t.  But there it is, in bits and bytes, ready and willing to be abused. 

This leads me to some questions for us:

Is it OK that our voting system has no integrity, as long as our side won?  Does it matter that we have no say, as long as the Hackers feel the same way you do and don't want Gay people to get married? 

If not now, when will it matter?

Will it matter that your vote doesn't count when your son gets drafted?  Will it matter when your Social Security money gets funneled into the pockets of a stock broker?  What about when your teenage daughter dies from a back-alley abortion because having a professional do it isn't legal anymore?  At what point will it matter that your vote doesn't count?

It matters to me RIGHT NOW.

This is so much bigger than partisan politics.  Come on, we all know there's not going to be a recall election - all the winners are in power!  In fact, the only Senator to lose his seat was Tom Daschle, the Democrat Minority Leader.  There's no doubt that the results went our way this time.  But what's going to happen in 2006?  Or 2008?  Everybody, including tens of thousands of pissed-off Democrats and foreign activists, knows this system can be hacked, and the next election is going to be Hacked to pieces.  If we don't fix this, we'll get Homer Simpson elected!  Ralph Nader will win states where he's not even on the ballot.  Richard Nixon will win 40% of the electorate, thereby furthering the process of bringing "Dignity back to the White House".  There's no WAY we'll be able to trust the results if we don't fix these systems, and fix them now. 

So what's stopping us?  It's not that hard to do - India just had a full election using electronic voting, so why can't we?  Here’s an idea - We already hire tens of thousands of software developers from India, so let's just take some of them to lunch one day and ask them how they did it.  It can be done, it's that simple, and we can restore the faith in our democracy that is now lost among millions of young Americans like myself, who seem destined to either become polarized radicals or simply bow out altogether, leaving the political process to be "somebody else's problem". 

I've gotta ask - Did something change, or was I so sheltered that this is really the America I grew up in?  Is this what we're fighting for, and killing for, and dying for in our effort to spread "democracy" so we can fix the rest of the world?  Does the rest of the world want to be “fixed” the way we are? 

Did we really get here by following the Moral Values that we "say" we hold so dear? If we were really following the teachings of Jesus, would we be in the spot we're in?

I dunno…. When you look at all we’re doing, I’m not so sure this is what God had in mind when He “told” Bush that he was “supposed to be President".  Do you think this is where we’d be if a real Disciple of Jesus were the one leading us? Not me.

I just don’t think that’s something Jesus Would Do.
 

Chuck

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