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Vets Rally at Gore's House

Wes Vernon

Monday, Nov. 20, 2000

WASHINGTON - Angry veterans and scores of their supporters, outraged at Gore campaign challenges to the absentee ballots of military men and women, demonstrated outside the residence of Vice President Al Gore. "Al Gore! We have you surrounded! Drop that hanging chad! Step away from the ballot box! And give our country back!" was the underlying chant of the protesters, repeated at different times, slowly and in unison.

"Jail to the Thief!", "Stop Thief!", and "Thou Shalt not Steal!" were among the placard slogans that were waved, as passing motorists blared their horns in support of the protest informally stitched together by groups ranging from Free Republic to the Maryland Republican Party

Connie Hair of nearby Alexandria, Va., had the bullhorn and thus became the de facto leader of the growing crowd demanding that Gore "get out of Cheney's house!" behind the heavy gates of the official vice president's residence along Washington's "Embassy Row."

Hair said the election system is supposed to see that votes are counted in all jurisdictions at the same time "so they can't cook the books" as soon as they find out how many they need to "steal the election." She said Al Gore's people have been playing the cheating game in Florida, where counties are reporting on the kind of staggered schedule that allows Gore to figure out how many votes he needs.

But what really prompted this demonstration, Hair told Newsmax.Com, was "the concerted effort, the five-page memo given to the Democrats on the canvassing board, including step-by-step instructions on how to expressly not count military votes."

"[Sailors on] the USS Cole were some of those people that sent in military ballots," she declared. "That [challenging their ballots] is un-American, unconscionable! Those [servicemen and women] are in harm's way" to defend our freedoms.

If Vice President Gore wants to be commander in chief, "he lacks the moral authority now. If he is not going to allow the very people who defend this country and defend our way of life to vote because he's afraid of their vote, then he has no moral authority to lead this country."

Expressing the desire "to end liberalism as a cultural force on this planet," the Virginia Alan Keyes supporter deplored "the garbage, this propaganda that the liberal media is putting out to the people."

She emphasized she was not there as a representative of Keyes. "I am here in my capacity as a United States citizen, trying to get this corrupt, lying, immoral, degrading administration out of our country."

Not all the demonstrators were as eager as Connie Hair to give their names to the media. After all, this is Occupied Washington, a company town where some of them hold jobs in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy or with lobbying interests that depend on government power for favors.

And there are veterans who will speak freely as long as you don't quote them by name, just because they've been burned so many times.

"I didn't even give an interview to the Baptist Standard, and I'm a Baptist," declared one of them.

"This country doesn't treat its military people very well," declared a crusty, embittered vet from east Texas.

He recalled how a friend of his had been hospitalized after being stoned not more than 50 feet from his plane after returning from Vietnam.

Another case he cited involved a returning Vietnam vet who fared even worse by some of his countrymen. The cruelest blow came when his mother, upon seeing a military vehicle pull up to her house, cried out with joy that her son was home at last. Out stepped a delegation of strangers to tell her that her son had been killed by an anti-war protester.

"And now this!" exclaimed the disgusted east Texas vet as he carried a placard reading "Let our troops vote!"

The irony of President Clinton's trip to Vietnam was not lost on a Washington, D.C., demonstrator.

"When he had his first invitation to go to Vietnam 30 years ago, he declined. He went to England and burned our flag."

As the crowd swelled by mid-afternoon, nervous D.C. police arrived and herded the protesters across the street, away from the gates to the vice president's mansion. It really didn't matter. Anyone inside that house would have had to stuff his ears in order to avoid hearing them.

Lynn Siguenza, a grandmother and naturalized U.S. citizen, said in broken English, "Bush won! They don't need to count anymore. The election is over and Bush is president!" The Rockville, Md., woman is originally from El Salvador, a country with some experience with rule by Marxist corruption.

Al Gore has all the security protection he could want. He need not fear having to face these citizens who feel he has betrayed the system by trying to steal the election right before the nation's eyes. He does not have to come out from behind those heavy gates and talk to them.

But they were not about to let him rest. Their chanting started in the early afternoon and continued well into the later hours, with signs proclaiming "Every vote counts - and counts and counts - unless they're military!"

An official-looking "shingle" read "Daley and Sons. Stealing elections for forty years."

These angry people did not grow weary as the hours wore on. The heavy gates could not possibly have shielded the mansion from sounds of the demonstrators singing "God Bless America" and the National Anthem, and the cries of "Al Gore is a chad molester!"

-- cin (cin@cin.cin), November 21, 2000