John McCain, the 2008 Election, and Civil Unrest

There is an interesting story about the 2008 election coming out of Wikileaks. Memos from Stratfor released by Wikileaks say that widespread voter fraud occurred in Ohio and that “black Dems were caught stuffing the ballot boxes in Philly.”  The McCain campaign knew about the fraud but feared taking action because of the “possibility of domestic violence” if they challenged the results in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

The memos say campaign staff urged candidate John McCain to act in court:

“Staff felt they could get a federal injunction to stop the process.”

One of the Wikileaked memos says: “Sen. McCain chose not to  fight.”  The reason?

The memo states:

“McCain felt the crowds assembled in support of Obama and such would be detrimental to our country and it would do our nation no good for this to drag out like last go around, coupled with the possibility of domestic violence.”

With the blessings of hindsight, we see that fear of mob violence in our country is no longer a hypothetical in the mind of a presidential candidate.  The call by the New Black Panther Party in Sanford, Florida, to seize (or kill) a private citizen is no longer the stuff of a senator’s imagination.

Recall Philadelphia was where the entire New Black Panther Party controversy started on election night. Poll watcher Bartle Bull has opined that one purpose of the presence of the New Black Panthers was to intimidate poll watchers, the exact people trained to detect and memorialize polling place misbehavior. That’s another reason why the dismissal of the lawsuit by the Holder Justice Department, even before discovery took place to investigate the events in Philadelphia, was such a blow to the rule of law.

Whether or not ballot boxes were stuffed by “black Dems” in Philadelphia is probably something we will never know. What we do know is this: First, that people in the McCain campaign thought they had evidence of election tampering that cost McCain the election.  Second, that McCain thought it best for the country to do nothing about it, in part because of fears of mob violence.

America is coasting along a slippery surface, and small concessions to the mob can resonate in ways we can’t predict. In seven months, we have a chance to reverse the mistakes of 2008, even if only to stand up to the mob this time.

Which raises the problem of Philadelphia. Obviously something is going very wrong in the City of Brotherly Love.  Elections there are a big giant spigot for the Left to keep the state blue.  GOP poll watchers are thrown out of precincts, New Black Panthers stalk the polls, and, worst of all, not enough poll watchers are available to cover all the precincts. It’s time that changed.  That’s why True the Vote is holding a summit April 27-28 in Houston, to mobilize and train a poll-watching army to deploy across the nation in November.

If you are sitting on the couch on Election Day watching it on TV, if you are at work instead of not using available leave, if you aren’t inside the polls on Election Day to prevent the mess of 2008 from repeating, you aren’t doing enough.  If not 2012, when?