This is a Game Where Principles are the Stake

Published on Monday, November 8, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
This is a Game Where Principles are the Stake
by Thom Hartmann
Even as the work goes on (for a look at an interesting analysis of Florida, check out http://thesquanderer.com/votingmachines.html), it's also important for us to keep last week's events in perspective.
Take heart. Democracy has come under assault in America before, we've survived, and the nation actually became stronger for the struggle.
The year 1798, for example, was a crisis year for democracy and those who, like Thomas Jefferson, believed the United States of America was a shining light of liberty, a principled republic in a world of cynical kingdoms, feudal fiefdoms, and theocracies.
That year President John Adams pushed through Congress - by a single vote - the Alien and Sedition Acts, and was aggressively putting into jail newspaper editors who disagreed with him and supported Jefferson. Benjamin Franklin Bache - Ben Franklin's grandson - had been one of the first, as he had just published an editorial referring to the President as, "old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams."
Then-Vice President Jefferson was wretched. He'd left town the day Adams signed the acts, as a symbolic act. He would have nothing to do with their implementation....