by John Price
SIX
September 4th
St. Louis – Jefferson Memorial Plaza
“When the Americans will think that it is peace and safety – from the middle of the country, some of the people will start fighting against the government. The government will be busy with internal problems.” (Pastor Duduman)
A FREE MIKE RALLY was announced by local supporters of Mike Chapel at the City’s election offices on Tucker Boulevard for a week from Saturday. Based on the spontaneous reaction received from sympathetic organizers around the country, the location for the rally was moved to the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, the location of the Gateway Arch. Local rally planners made it known that they had not, and would not, apply for a parade permit, and dared St. Louis city officials to try and stop anyone from attending the rally.
The St. Louis rally plans also went viral, as thousands of angry Americans decided that the line would have be drawn in St. Louis, and that they would attend the rally to protest the arrest of an obviously innocent man, as well as to forcefully object to clumsily-hidden voter fraud, apparently calculated to force back into office a President they could not stand. At the same time a composite undercover video e-flashed across the country showing election officials in eight states facilitating voter fraud. Cameras hidden in baseball caps captured election workers in the various offices handing out stacks of blank voter registration forms, confirming that “no ID is necessary” to register, nor do the “voters even need to show up at the offices” when the forms are returned, either by mail or just dropped off.
Once it became known that a significant throng of objectors were coming to St. Louis, the President’s supporters issued a national call for public employee union members, Occupation America supporters and others, who had trashed the Wisconsin State House in a fight over union rights, to come to St. Louis in order to overwhelm, or at least match, the “right wingers opposed to the re-election of our President and who are spreading lies about voter fraud.”
Organizers kicked off the rally held in the large open area near the Gateway Arch with the Pledge of Allegiance and the robust singing by many of the National Anthem. At about the time the words “the bombs bursting in air” were sung a loud WOOMPH sound was heard west of Jefferson Plaza. Cell phone owners texted relatives asking if there was anything on the news about what sounded like an explosion in downtown St. Louis. Within minutes a St. Louis radio station posted a news flash on their website reporting that the explosion might have been a bombing of the Election Commissioners building a few blocks west of the Plaza on Tucker Boulevard. Word quickly spread through the assembled partisans. Some were pleased, high-fiving others at the rally. Just as many, upon hearing the news, were angered, threatening those near them who were celebrating the bombing with violence and mayhem. Later investigation arrived at no official explanation for what appeared to be the loud sound of an explosion. Neither the St. Louis election offices nor any other downtown building suffered bomb damage.
What would later become known as the “St. Louis Riot” started within minutes of the spreading knowledge of the bombing that wasn’t. Unknown was what happened in the crowd to trigger the actual start of violence, but later video footage showed that it appeared to begin in the middle of the crowd and spread outward, with many of the uniformed police officers who were present either being struck, shot by firearms, or, in one case, stomped to death. Supporters of Mike Chapel later claimed that the riot was started by several men wearing black armbands or head bandanas, throwing the first punches and firing the first shots. They were labeled ‘Presidential Provocateurs’. Supporters of the President denied those claims and charged Chapel’s backers with spoiling for a fight, and beginning the riot.
Video revealed thousands of supporters and opponents of the President, based on their signs and badges, indiscriminately striking and assailing each other, punching and then shooting each other at close range. The final fatality count was so high neither side initially wanted to release the figures. St. Louis hospitals were overwhelmed with patients suffering injuries in the ensuing panic, as attendees fled the Plaza in all directions.
Both opponents of the President and his supporters across the nation hardened their positions as a result of what started at St. Louis. News stories analyzing what happened at the Gateway Arch also included local reports on voter registration abuses coming to light in every State. Since voter registration documents are generally accessible as public records, private individuals across the country began to comb through voter registration records, easily discovering widespread fraud and abuse. They soon found many instances where ten to twenty voters were registered at the same residence, which was usually an abandoned foreclosed house. Feeling the heat from local media and enraged voters, concerned public officials promised to investigate and correct what appeared to be a well-organized national effort to steal the election for the incumbent President. The fact that the dates on most of the fraudulent registrations started at about the time of his first election, and increased over time, reinforced suspicions that these were orchestrated moves from the highest levels to retain power.
Within days of these revelations, several public political events, Tea Party, Democrat or Republican, eventually ended in some level of violence. Some were limited to blows being exchanged, but then were broken up when cooler heads ultimately prevailed. Numerous outbreaks, though eventually led to bloodshed, and then frequently to the burning of automobiles and retail businesses. The President’s opponents loudly charged that the White House and its “radical shock troops” were actively engaged in “trying to steal the election that they know they can’t win if it’s a fair count.” At the same time the President’s supporters claimed that “the radical right is trying to besmirch our President because they know they don’t have the votes to win, so they are pushing their armed thugs into violence. They are racists who want to keep minorities from voting.”
Many tea party leaders and Republican officials were not content with public claims by election officials of Democrat Party-controlled cities that there was no reason to believe that voter fraud could occur in their communities. Several in Congress called for a thorough public examination of voting machines, including electronic devices, and ballot boxes. At least six separate Congressional committees called hearings to investigate voter fraud. None expected to be able to conduct hearings, arrive at findings, draft legislation and enact statutes before the upcoming election, which was mere weeks away.
Public skepticism that the election would be untainted increased dramatically when several unidentified persons broke into a regional office of the Cook County Clerk’s Office on the south side of Chicago. They found and pried open several locked ballot boxes stacked in the basement. All were stuffed with pre-cast ballots, heavily favoring the President by ten to one, or larger, margins. The boxes were dumped at the front door of WGN-TV on West Bradley Place in Chicago. The Mayor of Chicago accused the persons responsible with “committing the crime of burglary”. He claimed that “the burglars marked the previously blank ballots, in order to create a controversy and try to make a media splash.”
The revelation that the White House had jiggered official unemployment statistics by not counting ‘people no longer looking for work’, led many Americans to be suspicious that the same people who lied about the number of Americans out of work, would likewise falsify election returns. Honest election workers in various cities revealed that tens of thousands of registered voters were dead, but still registered to vote. A majority of the honest workers were subsequently fired, triggering even more voter anger.
The Department of Justice sued twelve States which adopted voter-ID laws, thus delaying the implementation of the laws requiring photo identification in order to vote until well after the election. The Attorney General accused States of trying to prevent minority voters from voting, by requiring photo identification. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court had years earlier approved Indiana’s voter ID law, the A
ttorney General used the issue to scare minority voters into to thinking that their right to vote was imperiled by the President’s opponents. The spark that the leader of the Department of Justice ignited led to many minority voters turning out into the streets to protest what they were told was an organized effort to keep them from voting for the re-election of the President.
Florida sought to remove what was estimated to be over one hundred thousand improper registrations by illegal residents, but was sued by the Department of Justice to prevent the State’s correction of fraud in its own voting records. The Attorney General accused several States seeking to void improper registrations with “voter suppression”. With the discovery of yet more pre-election voter fraud, with increasing numbers of registered undocumented immigrants, street riots broke out in increasing numbers of urban areas, with election offices burned and pillaged across the country. Several Mayors and Police Chiefs went on the record to claim that they “weren’t staffed well enough to protect every election office 24/7.” The mainstream media covered each event in depth, almost non-stop, at the same time airing demands by supporters of the President that the White House do something, forcefully and immediately, about the spreading violence, which “threatened to put the upcoming election results into question.”
SEVEN
New York City, NY
Election Night
Chip Meadors, the MSBCN talking head, who once famously told viewers that whenever he heard the President speak he got an electric charge up his leg, could hardly contain himself. Voting booths in Ohio had been closed for over an hour when Meadors made his cable network’s official call:
“Yes,… yes,… indeedy, its now official, it’s official, based on the overwhelming results in the Buckeye State, MSBCN is calling Ohio for the President. Ohio will be solidly blue. That’s a HUGE win for the President, folks, as our network is now calling the race for the President. Let me repeat. The President HAS BEEN RE-ELECTED. All that tea party, patriot chatter about losing Constitutional rights apparently just didn’t seem to work in this critical Midwestern State. In any case, it’s a major win for the President. The President has been handily re-elected to a second term. That should encourage a lot of Americans, frankly, like yours truly, who have been pacing the floor today, all of us worried about how the voting would turn out. Whew.”
The mood up the street in New York City at the Fox News broadcast studios was somewhat less ebullient. Shane Harrison, not smiling, nor apparently feeling any electric shocks up his leg, turned his attention to camera two:
“Folks, I’ve covered elections and election campaigns for 12 years and I’ve never seen the public opinion polls right before election day take such a decided shift in favor of a candidate. The Bush drunk driving story made a six point difference, but according to Zogby, CNN, CBS, the Wall Street Journal, just about all the polls, the President went from a virtual tied race before October 26th to last night’s final polling. That’s a huge shift, almost unheard of in American politics.”
Grenda Sandora, obviously less upset with the polling results than her co-host of Fox Election Night Coverage, wasted no time in challenging his comments. “Shane, you may be right about the size of the shift in voter sentiment. But what living being on this planet doubted that the President would win today, and win really big?”
“We face staggering levels of national debt, the overhaul of our nation’s health care system, widespread civil unrest as we saw almost daily in the campaign, a declining dollar, possible food shortages. But all anybody could talk about in the national media was the how much money the President’s opponent had. How many houses. How many cars. They may have dealt the country a potentially fatal blow by re-electing the President to a second term.”
Every major media outlet soon called the election for the President, acknowledging that control of the U.S. Senate would remain with the President’s party, and that the next Speaker of the House would be former Speaker Nadia Pelham, by a hefty margin of newly elected Democrat Representatives. The other 49 states split 34 for the President and 15 for his opponent. The red states were mostly western states, including Texas, in which gun advocates, tea party and patriot groups appeared to have their greatest electoral strength. The electoral college final count was even more lop-sided, 348 for the President and 190 for his Republican opponent.
What was not settled by the election results, though, were Americans’ angry suspicions of voter fraud orchestrated by the White House. The internet was full of claims that the vote was rigged in the battleground states. Many precincts in key areas of critical states recorded more voters casting votes than were actually registered in the precincts. In hundreds of precincts the President’s opponent received either no votes at all, or only a vote or two compared with hundreds cast for the President. The mainstream media were not at all sympathetic to such claims, most media outlets refusing to cover the violence caused by those who strenuously objected to the re-election of their President, under a cloud of charges of vote fraud. In any case, within hours of the final polls closing, Americans knew that their President had won and had four more years to serve in his second term.
EIGHT
Sandusky, Ohio
Dr. Adam Nation never expected to be a politician. He had frequently declared how much he detested politicians, from all political parties. Thus, it came as quite a surprise when Dr. Adam Nation agreed to run for Congress as a tea party backed candidate from the 9th District of Ohio, traditionally a Democrat District. Dr. Nation was a respected forty-six year old OBGYN who had developed firm political beliefs about how government should function. He was fed up with seeing his patients’ retirement funds chewed up by a federal government that couldn’t seem to control its spending, but which was unable to encourage job growth, choosing instead to incur trillions of dollars of new debt.
Dr. Adam Nation became the consensus choice by tea party activists to run for Congress from his District, in what became a contentious, sometimes violent campaign. Supporters of the three candidates for Congress accused the opposing candidates of vote fraud. Once martial law was declared for Ohio, Adam Nation wished he had never agreed to run. When the votes were counted, though, it appeared that the vote in at least his district hadn’t been rigged. He bested the two candidates from the Democrat and Republican parties, and joined several other tea party members in the new U.S. House of Representatives.
Congressman Nation planned to waste no time in advancing his conservative causes in the U.S. House. Political media profiles routinely described him as ruggedly handsome, frequently referring to his ‘muscular Marine build’. Unlike most of his classmates in medical school, who went into lucrative medical practices after medical school, Dr. Nation joined the Marines and served his country as a medical doctor, frequently in combat zones. At five foot ten inches he wouldn’t tower over his colleagues, but his engaging personality led people to enjoy his company. A principled conservative, he had promised himself, his wife, his college aged children and the voters of his district one major promise. He assured them that “I’m going to change Washington. I will not allow Washington to change me.” Like all Americans, he had frequently watched the newly elected eventually become the new establishment, and then become the new embarrassment. He was committed to not letting it happen to himself. He decided this after a talk he had soon after his election with a former Congressman who had lived through all three stages. The Congressman had served in the House as a conservative Republican, risen to a leadership position and then resigned in shame. He first reached out to Adam Nation the day after Dr. Nation’s surprise upset election. He drove to Ohio to meet with the Congressman-elect.
“Thanks for meeting with me, Congressman. I certainly know how busy you are as you wind up your practice and head to DC soon. I asked to see you because I think I may be able to be of some help as you take on your new duties.”
“Congressman, first of all, I’m not a Congressman yet, as you know, so just call me Adam. There ar
e lots of people, I’m finding, who want to tell me how to take on my new duties. But, I’ll admit I was intrigued by your message, I think it said I might want to talk to a fallen leader before I make the same mistakes you made. That got my attention. Congressman, I appreciate your driving over to see me.”
“Adam, I’m no longer a Congressman, so just call me Mike. It’s my privilege to drive over and tell you what I’m about to tell you. If somebody had done this for me, I’d probably still be in Congress. If you have a few minutes, let me share what I’ve learned about the arrogance of power.”
“Mike, I’ve got all the time you need. I respected you when you were in Congress, and I thought you did the right thing when you resigned, after…. your….your….”
“Don’t mince words. I resigned after my adultery was revealed, I’m sorry to say. But, we’ll come back to that. Let’s start with the basics. People who get elected to high public office, I’m not talking about the township council here, find an interesting thing occurs as soon as they win….they immediately begin to receive praise, even adulation, from other people. It’s apparently a human failing that when we are around people that we think are important, we act differently towards them than we would if we thought they weren’t important. I can’t explain it, but I’ve witnessed it first hand, personally, and watched it affect my colleagues. One day, you’re candidate Adam Nation, nice guy, normal sort of fellow. The next day, after you are elected to Congress, all of a sudden, you’ve become a super human. People don’t call you Adam, or even Doctor, they call you Congressman, or United States Representative, or the Distinguished Gentleman from Ohio. You are now SOMEBODY.