Robert F. Kennedy Jr.�s Rolling Stone article, Was the 2004 Election Stolen?, takes a needed look back at the many ways the Ohio 2004 vote was sandbagged by more illegal dirty tricks than the mind can fathom. The footnotes that document the article online nearly equal its length. The bottom line is a painful reminder that Ohio was swiped from Kerry, handing Bush the presidential victory. Just as the misdeeds of Katherine Harris, Florida Republicans, and the United States Supreme court swung the 2000 election in Bush�s favor away from Gore.

What do we take from this? First, that the numbers of Democratic voters must be substantially higher than Republican voters, given the depth and variety of thefts to grab votes. Republican fear and greed led to using every dirty trick in the book to nullify the margin. Second, the shameless employment of illegal tactics in two elections iterates the massive illegality of the party in power. Third, being governed by a party that illegally seized the rule of our nation, mandates a response to the Bill of Rights and Constitution to fight today�s despots and one way or the other wrench this would-be American democracy from their hands.

This I realize may seem like a radical view, even potentially violent. Yet the founders of this country faced a similar situation, when only the resort to insurrection and revolution turned the British from taxing them without representation and from refusing to loosen their political and economic grip on the 13 colonies. After much bloodshed, some 25,324 Americans lost, 8,445 wounded, the British departed, leaving this new country to be formed.

Nor did their heirs in the slave trade go away. They forced Jefferson, in order to pass of the Bill of Rights, to eliminate language that declared slaves as people, as anything but chattel, thereby perpetuating the institution to the Civil War, which began on 12 April 1861, with the firing on Fort Sumter, and ended 9 April 1865, with the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Despite the repeated entreaties of Lincoln that the Union must hold, and that the institution of slavery must be abolished, the reactionary slave-owning Southerners insisted on seceding from the Union to preserve their aberrant political beliefs.

In the ensuing Civil War, the bloodiest war in America�s history, with 562,135 deaths, 363,020 northern, 199,110 southern, the Union held, slavery was officially abolished via the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Union armies remained in the south to enforce the Proclamation and the democracy it promised for all Americans, not just white ones. Unfortunately, when the Union Armies left, we saw a deconstruction into segregation.

The nearly 600,000 dead of the Civil War, since it was Americans fighting Americans, outgunned the nearly 400,000 men lost in World War II fighting the international fascist axis. The Civil War death toll easily surpassed the more than 58,000 American fighting men lost in Vietnam, though that figure was dwarfed by the military/civilian Vietnamese death toll of 2-plus million. The Korean War weighed in with 54,246 dead Americans, slightly fewer than Vietnam. The Persian Gulf Was lost 148 men, but Iraq II has lost 2,700 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis so far and the toll is rising daily. These figures, all but the last, come from the US Registry of all wars, which also lists the wounded and those dead from various special ops and sorties into other countries� business. Looking at the numbers is quite sobering.

Yet these figures are given to remind those in power of the terrible toll American wars, whether international, bi-national, or domestic, have taken. And will take when a significant portion of the citizenry feels pushed against an illegal and inflexible wall of offenses, particularly the usurpation of our most fundamental right to vote for our duly elected leaders. We are not a docile people, neither from the left, right nor center, judging from past and present deeds. Nor will we be deprived of this fundamental right to vote or of other constitutional rights recently put aside by the non-Patriot Acts I and II. The Bush administration and its cohorts are courting disaster.

As a humble student of history, a citizen, a voter and taxpayer, I caution them to study the fall of the fascist axis of Germany, Italy and Japan in World War II and their illusory pursuit of global power. It is not just more than half the American voters who are seriously disconcerted by the illegal abuses of power by this administration, both at home and at war. It is the world that is watching, certainly threatened by the ongoing demise of the world�s once-leading democracy into a wobbling world empire. Its designers have brought us to the brink of nuclear conflagration and political chaos.

As a student of American history, I do not think freedom-loving Americans find this an appealing possibility. Kenneth Blackwell, as Ohio�s Secretary of State, sets an appalling example of a backroom racketeer, from stealing votes by sheer intimidation to rigged electronic voting machines, the misappropriation of voting machines to the denial of voting rights to the poor, the aged, black Americans, students, and even members of the armed services, among other offenses. And now Blackwell, criminal himself for his deeds, is running for governor of Ohio, backed of course by President Bush. All this malfeasance leads honest people one way or another towards insurrection rather than this continued, controlled repression. Honest voting, if it were allowed to occur, is in fact the easy way out. But the perpetrators don�t desire this.

In the words of James Madison, �If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.� Unfortunately, the men who rule today are far from being angels, including their evangelical friends. And they are busy suspending internal controls on government, from spending to the environment, to food and drugs, to nuclear proliferation, among others. Externally, the criticism they receive from former allies, foreign press, and so called �threatening� nations, has had some intimidating effect on their gobbling up the globe for oil.

But let me return to the basic issue, the safety, the very life of our voting system.

The integrity of that system is at the very heart of our Republic's democracy. None of us, I repeat, none of us, should be willing to stand by in the light of the information RFK, Jr., Bev Harris, Rep. John Conyers and many others have presented to us. None of us should be willing to watch the heart of democracy, our voting system, systematically stabbed to death by a gang of treasonous thugs. And the beneficiaries of this traitorous conspiracy should be turned out of office and imprisoned, however that needs to be done, whatever the price that needs to be paid. In fact, there is no greater price we can pay than succumbing to their fascist tyranny.