During the 2000 US presidential election, most Americans concluded that something was rotten in Florida. After the 2004 election, they believe something is rotten in the United States.

During and before the 2004 election, GOP election officials -- chiefly county voter registrars and secretaries of state of the various states -- illegally purged over a million liberal and moderate voters from voters registration lists. They threw hundreds of thousands of absentee and provisional ballots of liberal and moderate voters into the dumpster or stuffed them into the shredder. They concocted impossible voter turnouts, sometimes as much as 120% of the electorate of their districts. They sent ridiculously insufficient number of voting machines to liberal and moderate precincts. They changed polling places at the last minute. They lost voting records for liberal and moderate precincts at the last minute. They booted up voting equipment sometimes five hour after the poll opened.  They hired thugs or so-called "voter challengers" show up at liberal and moderate precincts, backed up by a uniformed police presence, to threaten, jawbone, and otherwise humiliate and intimidate voters.

GOP operatives, perhaps independent of corrupt GOP election officials, mailed millions of letters falsely telling liberal and moderate voters that their voter registrations were invalid.  These GOPs made millions of phone calls -- both automated and live -- to dispense all kinds of false information about polling places, registrations, criminal backgrounds, and required pre-voting paper work.

These operations are felonies, violating US laws against mail and wire fraud.

Executives of the three major voting machine manufacturing companies -- ES&S, DIEBOLD, and SEQUOIA -- which account for 90% of the voting machines in use in the United States, openly campaigned for Bush and other GOPs. They were fundraisers for the GOPs. They were financial donors to the GOPs. They provided software for their voting machines with backdoor access for unauthorized individuals and groups so that vote totals could be altered to favor Bush and his GOPs. Some of the executives were ex-convicts who have done hard time for computer fraud and other offenses. They withheld access to their software to liberal and moderate government officials who purchased their voting machines, selectively claiming a proprietary interest in the software.

The GOPs and the executives of the voting machine companies vehemently oppose all demands for a auditable paper trail as a complement to electronic voting or other means by which the count can be verified.

Liberal candidates, cheated out of victory by the GOPs in the rigged election, were badgered or blackmailed into conceding defeat.

Neither the FBI nor local law enforcement nor Congress nor the media will investigate the rigged 2004 election.

The media, or, more correctly, the PR industry, was in full collusion with the cheating GOPs, publishing false opinion polls, timely suppressing and manipulating exit polls, and promptly anointing  Bush and his election-stealing Gops as winners.

Goose-stepping GOP judges dismissed in 2004 lawsuit after lawsuit contesting rigged elections.

This is an incomplete list of the dirty tricks the GOPs used in 2004 to defile American democracy.

The United States is now -- in 2005 -- just another Florida, democratically rotten to core, full of political lies and cheating.

In the wake of the election fraud perpetrated on Nov. 3, 2004, aggrieved individuals and groups filed 38,000 complaints about election rigging. The 38,000 complaints reflect only a small fraction of the GOP cheating and rigging that reversed the outcome of the election.

There can be little doubt that the liberals and moderates were robbed of an estimated 7 million votes, more than enough to give them a huge victory over the deceitful GOPs.

The 2004 presidential election differs from 2000. In 2000, African-American voters, who tend to support for liberals, were the main targets of voter suppression operations by the GOPs. Various studies have found that over 1 million African-Americans were denied their right to vote in 2000. In 2004, The GOPs targeted selected whites and Latin Americans as well as African-Americans in their voter suppression operations.

George W. Bush is not the president of the United States. He is a dictator who arrogantly and illegally occupies the White House because he and his GOPs stole the 2004 election.

At the moment, the liberals and moderates daydream about a big comeback or an upset victory in 2006 or 2008 or 2010 or 2012.

They just don't get it. Yet.

The GOPs have securely and perhaps permanently rigged the US political system.

The GOP dictatorship is institutionalized. The GOPs have put their goose-steppers at the controls of all three branches of the government.

Perhaps more discouraging than the GOP dictatorship over the United States are the leaders of the liberals and moderates. Most of them are weak and timid, more disposed to snivel over the rise of an unconstitutional power in this country than to fight it.

Terrified of being labeled paranoids or a conspiracy theorists, the liberal and moderate leaders who see the danger refuse to stand up for the constitution. They sit down and wiggled in their seats, believing that they are doing something, by wiggling.

They say they will do something if they have "proof" like in the �70s with the Watergate threat to the constitution.

They can�t see that the electoral fraud of 2004 is one hundred thousands times more "proof" of unconstitutional conduct than the break-ins, enemy list, and cover-up of Watergate.

There is not one Sam Ervin or John Sirica among them.

The GOPs may suggest that as long as Bush exercises power in accordance with the rule of law, it doesn't matter how he or his GOP successors got into the White House.

What can the American people do if he doesn't exercise power in accordance with the rule of law?

Vote him or his goppish successors out of office?

That's impossible under the existing electoral circumstances.

What's more, if the "torture" memo prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department in 2004 is any indication, Bush has peculiar ideas about the rule of law.

Bush believes that his position as commander in chief authorizes his disregard for US law which he finds conflicts with his war-making powers as commander in chief. Thus, Bush can, according to the Justice Department memo, okay abductions, torture, and even murder if these acts appear to him consistent with his duties as commander in chief.

If the FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act in January 2005 relating to the torture of inmates at the US Guantanamo camp in Cuba are accurate, Bush, in fact, signed a secret executive order that authorizes the torture and murder   (the last third of the Justice Department's 59-page memo deals with murder) by US military, intelligence operatives, and "private security contractors" -mercenaries - retained by the United States.

So, where does all of this leave us?

It leaves us with a two-faced, lying dictator in the White House wearing cowboy boots, who talks about freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, while he cheats his way into power and then stands above the law.

It leaves us with a rot that's spreading.

� Copyright 2005 by AxisofLogic.com