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Found this on Delay website:
The X-Files Democrats
Mr. Speaker,
What we are witnessing here today is a shame.
The issues at stake in this petition are gravely serious, but the specific charges — as any objective observer must acknowledge — are not.
That is because the purpose of this petition is not justice, but noise.
It is a warning to Democrats across the country — now in the midst of soul-searching after their historic losses in November — not to moderate their party’s message.
It is just the second day of the 109th Congress, and the first chance of the Democrat congressional leadership to show the American people what they have learned since President Bush’s historic reelection, but they have turned to what might be called the “X-Files Wing” of the Democrat Party to make their first impression.
Rather than substantive debate, Democrat leaders are still adhering to a failed strategy of spite, obstruction, and conspiracy theories.
They accuse the president — who, we are told, is apparently a closet computer nerd — of personally overseeing the development of vote-stealing software.
We are told, without any evidence, that unknown Republican agents stole the Ohio election and that its electoral votes should be awarded to the winner of an exit poll instead.
Many observers will discard today’s petition as a partisan waste of time, but it is much worse.
It is an assault against the institutions of our representative democracy; it is a threat to the very ideals it ostensibly defends.
No one is served by this petition, not in the long run.
And in the short term, its only beneficiaries are its proponents themselves.
Democrats around the country have asked since Election Day — and will no doubt ask again today — how it came to this.
The Democrat Party was once an idealistic, forward-looking policy colossus.
The New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the Great Society, the space program, civil rights …
And yet, today, one is hard-pressed to find a single positive, substantive idea on the left.
Instead, the Democrats have replaced statecraft with stagecraft, substance with style, and not a very fashionable style at that.
The petitioners claim they act on behalf of disenfranchised voters, but no such voter disenfranchisement occurred in the election of 2004 or for that matter, the election of 2000.
Everybody knows it. The voters know it. The candidates know it. The courts know it. The evidence proves it.
We’re not here to debate evidence, but to act our roles in a scripted, insincere morality play.
Remember, preelection memos revealed that Democrat campaign operatives around the country were encouraged by their high command in Washington to charge voter fraud and intimidation regardless of whether any occurred.
Remember, neither of the Democrat candidates supposedly robbed in Ohio endorses this petition.
It is a crime against the dignity of American democracy, and that crime is not victimless.
If, as now appears likely, Democrats cry fraud and corruption every election regardless of the evidence, what will happen when one day voters are routinely intimidated, rights are denied, or, God forbid, an election is robbed?
What will happen, when, God forbid, this quadrennial crying wolf so poisons our democratic processes that a similarly frivolous petition in a close election in the future is actually successful, and the American people are denied their constitutional right to choose their president?
Mr. Speaker, Democrats must find a way to rise above this self-destructive — and just plain destructive — theory of politics for its own sake.
A dangerous precedent is being set today, and it needs to be curbed.
Because Democrat leaders aren’t just hurting themselves.
By their irresponsible tactics, they hurt the House, they hurt the nation, and they hurt rank-and-file Democrats at kitchen tables around the country.
The American people, and their ancestors who invented our miraculous system of government, deserve better.
This petition is beneath us, Mr. Speaker, but more importantly, it is beneath the men and women we serve.
I urge my colleagues to do the right thing, vote no, and get back to the real work the American people hired us to do.
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