Isn't it a question of integrity?

Can we respect a president who wants things to go one way, and one way only, and will do anything, including abandon reason, logic, and integrity, to get them to go that way?

I think that's a question before the American people today. And it's a spiritual question, not merely a political one.

The comments here I first posted on this blog last Friday. But I kept them up there only until mid-morning, because the John McCain Minister Fiasco seemed much more newsworthy at the time, and I turned by attention to that. But now, today, I want to return to this question of integrity in office -- and while campaigning.

May I ask an embarrassing question? Is it out of integrity to demand that the rules of engagement in any contest be changed when one finds out that one is losing? I know, I know...this is getting to be a really worn out subject -- but not, as I have observed it, from the point of view I am asking us to explore here.

I mean, I really want to know...why isn't anybody bringing up the question of the "integrity" as it relates to all of this? As I wrote in the blog entry I replaced very early last Friday, I hate to keep harping about it, but, honestly, no one seems to be just standing up publicly and loudly and asking this plain, simple question. At least, no one with any real Voice of Moral Authority.

I know this is all hard to take for the folks who are supporting Hillary Clinton in her bid for the presidency -- and I know that it is equally hard to take for some (but by no means all) of the voters in Florida and Michigan -- but the fact of the matter is that Hillary SIGNED AN AGREEMENT to disallow the results of the primary elections in those two states because the state parties themselves violated the rules by which the national Democratic Party governs itself, and set the dates of their primaries ahead of almost anyone else's...in order to steal the "impact" from other states and give their states more early influence in the presidential race.

The national party told them, clearly and succinctly: Don't do this. You will wind up giving your states less influence. Indeed, no influence. We will not count your results in the final tally. Our party's candidates will not even campaign there.

AND ALL OF THE CANDIDATES -- INCLUDING HILLARY CLINTON -- AGREED.

Barack Obama even took his name off of the Michigan ballot while there was still time before they were printed.

Now Hillary Clinton says the votes in those two states should be counted. And all the delegates should be seated at the national convention in August in Denver. She figures that since she "won" both primaries, this would help her in her quest for the Democratic nomination. But I don't think it would help her at all. I don't think it's helping her to even suggest it. Do you know why? Because it's revealing her to be a cheater.

I'm sorry, but that's the only description I can think of here. Anybody who insists on changing the rules in the middle of the game when they are losing in nothing more than a cheater. As one ABC News commentator put it, "It is as if Barack Obama is on the 99-yard line and in the final moments of the game Clinton wants the football field extended from 100 to 120 yards."

T'aint fair, McGee. T'aint fair.

Frankly, I don't know how anyone could say it was fair. Yet many supporters of Hillary Clinton now are, hoping to bolster her argument. And Hillary isn't making it any easier for her party to find a reasonable compromise to this situation, because now she's running around comparing the problems in Florida and Michigan to the voting problems in Zimbabwe, for heaven sake...or, in hopes of getting in more sympathy from women, to the long struggle for feminine equality.

Anything -- she'll apparently do anything -- to get nominated.

Yet this whole Florida/Michigan fiasco is partly her own doing. She signed the Agreement disallowing those results. Top people in her own campaign (Terry McAuliffe, her campaign's chairman!!) sat on the committee that created the rules that were broken in Florida and Michigan. McAuliffe was actually the person who told the two states that they would lose 50% of their delegates if they went ahead with their out-of-sequence primaries. "The rules are the rules," he said.(Of course, that was when he thought his candidate was going to be a walk-away winner, a shoo-in for the nomination. Now Mr. McAuliffe is choking on this words.) In addition, Harold Ickles, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, is a member of the rule committee that voted to strip the delegates of FL and MI.

Now (talking about choking on their own words), let's listen to the words of Hillary Clinton herself:

"It's clear," Clinton told New Hampshire Public Radio last Fall, "this election [Michigan is] having is not going to count for anything. I personally did not think it made any difference whether or not my name was on the ballot," reports the ABC news correspondent I quoted earlier, Russell Goldman.

Now after all that, I dare any Clinton supporter, male OR female, to write me a comment below explaining to me how it is fair to now count the votes and the delegates in Michigan and Florida. I double dare anyone to tell me how in the world Clinton can claim a victory in Michigan, where Obama's name was not even on the ballot.

I am going to quote now from an editorial in the International Herald Tribune a while back, which puts all of this into context. Says that editorial, in part:

Both the Democratic and Republican parties set dates for when the states could hold their primaries or caucuses. This was reasonable; otherwise, a billboard war of attention would have taken place, pushing the election calendar forward to 2007 and lengthening an already-too-protracted process.

Moreover, it was wisely decided that smaller states should go first, or else money alone would determine who would win.

Florida and Michigan could have set their primaries or caucuses anywhere from mid-February to June. Instead, they decided to violate the rules and schedule January contests in hopes of attracting more focus.

The two parties had agreed they wouldn't play this game, which ignored the rules. The Republicans wisely devised a compromise where the two states were allowed to vote early while losing half their delegates. Foolishly, the Democrats didn't do the same.
Clinton, the only person whose name was on the ballot, won the Michigan primary with 55 percent of the vote; she also captured the Florida race, where no one campaigned or advertised.

These were shams. Evidence of that: Democratic turnout has soared everywhere this year - running far ahead of the other party even in Republican-leaning states. In Texas, there were almost three million Democratic voters on March 4, twice as many as the Republicans. In Michigan and Florida, the Democratic turnout was less than that of the Republicans, because voters knew the contests didn't matter.

I want you to read that part again. This international newspaper says that those primary elections in Florida and Michigan were "shams." Evidence of that is the low turnout of Democrats -- less than half of the Republicans..."because voters knew the contests didn't matter."

Again, I dare any Clinton supporter to explain to the American people and the world why Hillary Clinton's claim that the election results from those states should now be counted is not an even bigger sham than the elections themselves.