Cancel The Elections!

The elections in Spain following the terrorist attack must have chilled the hearts of W's minions. The opposition to W's sole Major European supporter—after Britain—swept to an electoral upset. Solution for W's minions? Cancel the November elections in the U.S. A preemptive response to terrorist activity to disrupt U.S. elections. Instead of an electoral crisis in Florida, suspend elections indefinitely. As the Reichstag Fire brought the Nazis to power in 1933, a preemptive response to al Qaeda terrorism in 2004 will give us 4 more years of nuke-u-lar and Eye-rack plus the solidification of Halliburton, Inc. as the #1 federal contractor. If this is (fair & balanced) skepticism, so be it.

[x Wikipedia]
Reichstag Fire

The Reichstag fire, a pivotal event in the establishment of Nazi Germany, began at 9.14 p.m. on the night of February 27, 1933, when a Berlin fire station received an alarm that the Reichstag building, assembly location of the German Parliament, was ablaze. The fire seemed to have been started in several places, and by the time the police and firemen arrived a huge explosion had set the main Chamber of Deputies in flames. Looking for clues, the police quickly found Marinus van der Lubbe, half-naked, cowering behind the building.

Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring arrived soon after, and when they were shown Van der Lubbe, a known Communist agitator, Göring immediately declared that the fire was set by the Communists and had the party leaders arrested. Hitler took advantage of the situation to declare a state of emergency and encouraged the aging president Paul von Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree, abolishing most of the human rights provided for by the 1919 constitution of the Weimar Republic.

According to the police, Van der Lubbe claimed to have set the fire as a protest against the rising power of the Nazis. Under torture, he confessed again, and was brought to trial, along with the leaders of the opposition Communist Party. With their leaders in jail and denied access to the press, the Communists were badly defeated in the next election and those Communist (and some Social Democratic) deputies that were elected to the Reichstag were not permitted by the SA to take their seats. Hitler was swept to power with 44 percent of the vote and coerced the remaining minor parties to give him the two-thirds majority for his Enabling Act which gave him the right to rule by decree and suspended many civil liberties.

At his trial, Van der Lubbe was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was beheaded on July 10, 1934, three days before his 25th birthday.

On the other hand, in one of the last twitches of a constitutional state, the Reichsgericht court acquitted the communist party leadership. This infuriated Hitler, who decreed that henceforth treason – among many other offenses – would only be tried by a newly established Volksgerichtshof ("People's Court"), which became infamous for the enormous number of death sentences that it imposed under the later lead of Roland Freisler.

Historians generally agree that Van der Lubbe, sometimes described as a half-wit, was involved in the Reichstag fire. The extent of the damage, however, has led to considerable debate over whether he acted alone. Considering the speed with which the fire engulfed the building, Van der Lubbe's reputation as a fool hungry for fame, and cryptic comments by leading Nazi officials, it is generally believed that the Nazi hierarchy was involved in order to reap political gain—and it obviously did.

At Nuremberg, captured General Franz Halder, claimed that Göring had confessed to setting the fire: "At a luncheon on the birthday of Hitler in 1942, the conversation turned to the topic of the Reichstag building [fire] and its artistic value. I heard with my own ears when Göring interrupted the conversation and shouted: 'The only one who really knows about the Reichstag is I, because I set it on fire!' With that he slapped his thigh with the flat of his hand."

Göring denied that he had any involvement in the fire. "I had nothing to do with it. I deny this absolutely. I can tell you in all honesty, that the Reichstag fire proved very inconvenient to us. After the fire I had to use the Kroll Opera House as the new Reichstag and the opera seemed to me much more important than the Reichstag. I must repeat that no pretext was needed for taking measures against the Communists. I already had a number of perfectly good reasons in the forms of murders, etc."

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Reichstag Fire".

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[x Ntimes]
Terror Issue Raises Question of Vote Delay
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON, July 11 - Federal officials are looking into what legal authority if any they would have to postpone the November presidential election in the event of a terrorist strike, a Department of Homeland Security official said Sunday.

Domestic security officials referred the question last week to the Justice Department for a legal analysis after receiving a letter from DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the United States Election Assistance Commission, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Though officials warned last week that Al Qaeda might seek to disrupt the election, the official cautioned that there was no specific intelligence that such an attack was in the works. Postponing the election would be an enormous logistical task and would probably require an act of Congress and perhaps a constitutional amendment, the official said, adding, "But we're certainly looking at the issue very seriously."

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[x NYTimes]
White House Tries to Calm Hubbub Over Vote Delay
By CARL HULSE

The idea of postponing the November elections was the talk of Capitol Hill Monday, where hundreds of politicians have thought of little else for the last year but making it to Nov. 2. So even theoretical talk of moving the date — even for such a serious matter as a potential terror attack — was hard for these electoral professionals to contemplate.

"Not with this tempo," said Representative Tom Reynolds of New York, the chairman of the Republican House campaign effort and a man who is logging plenty of campaign-related hours. "Lets get it over with."

As the hubbub rose over what would be a historic change, the White House decided to quickly show that it was not seriously considering a postponement.

"This administration believes that the elections will go forward on schedule, that there is no reason to think about anything else," President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said on CNN. "We've had elections in this country when we were at war, even when we were in civil war. And we should have the elections on time. That's the view of the president, that's the view of the administration."

But Democrats could not resist getting in a few digs at their opponents over the idea, with one comparing it to recent controversies in the House over extended floor votes. "They will start the election on time," said Rahm Emanuel of Illinois. "They will just keep it open until they win."

Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company