A PATRIOT DIRGE: The Strange Case of Simon Juneau

The Limits of Conscience
Redemption in a Box

Hands trembling, tears welling in eyes of remorse, a veteran of four decades of political warfare, a little man with thin, snow white hair and wire rim glasses to compensate his fading vision, Simon Juneau crouched over a computer, pecking the keyboard one key at a time.

In the barren desert of Southeast Arizona, Juneau was as far removed from the political world as imagination would allow. Like many of his colleagues, he was coaxed from retirement once in 2000 and once again in 2004.

He had hoped for nothing more than to spend his remaining days on earth seeking solace with the silent desert. Instead, he was summoned by the irresistible call of history. In Florida, he worked his magic behind the scenes, orchestrating protests, manipulating media coverage, leaking memos and inventing poll data.

It was Juneau who convinced the overmatched Democrats that they should limit their demands to a few key counties, thus sacrificing the moral high ground and departing from the dictates of Floridian law. A statewide recount would have handed the election and the White House to Al Gore but a limited recount in counties largely controlled by Democrats would leave the Bush victory in place.

Juneau often wondered how stupid the Democrats could be. They were lawyered up but their operatives went missing. He wondered if in fact they were in on the fix.

What happened in Florida? It was a conspiracy to defraud the American electorate. It was a disgrace to American democracy. The Republicans played hardball, promising a scorched earth unless the case was allowed to be played out in the courts on their own terms. The Democrats, with a thousand black tie attorneys, naively thought they could win on the issue of hanging chads.

When the case was thrown up to the most partisan Supreme Court in history, the fix was in. What should have been an indictment of Governor Jeb Bush and his lackey Secretary of State, a case of fraud and disenfranchisement on a scale unseen since the days of Jim Crow, was never heard.

The real story was never told by a corrupt corporate media.

Simon Juneau watched the events of September 11, 2001, and all that followed with the skepticism of an old man who had seen too much. He watched the bombardment of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq and he cursed the day he was born.

If he had not worked his magic in Florida, perhaps the Democrats would have prevailed. Assuming a terrorist attack was somehow preordained, how would President Albert Gore have responded? Whatever else, he was certain we would not have gone to war with a country that had nothing to do with the attack on this nation.

Juneau was a tortured soul but there was little he could do until the 2004 election, when the call went out to all operatives to come to Ohio for what seemed a reprise of Florida 2000. It was his chance at redemption and what he learned in a matter of days was more than enough to turn the republic on its head.

No one was more disappointed than Simon Juneau when Democrat John Kerry yielded the election without a fight. He felt cheated. At the end of a long and distinguished career, he felt the sting of a betrayal so profound it overshadowed all else. He no longer perceived himself as an instrument of democracy; he was a conspirator to treason.

There was no other word. Stealing an election was treason to its core. Handing the reins of the most powerful government on earth to a group of maniacs and an ambitious boy king was a crime against civilization for which hundreds of thousands if not millions would pay with their lives.

Beads of cold sweat ran down his wrinkled forehead as he tapped the last few keystrokes. He copied the file to disk, took a breath, removed it and sealed it with a cassette recording in a padded envelope. He made another copy, scribbled a note, sealed it in a separate envelope, and then sat back and tried to restore calm.

Here was a man who had gripped the hands of monumental American leaders – Nixon, Ford, Johnson, Reagan, Bush – yet now, at the twilight of his journey through life, he could not stop his hands from shaking.

Eyes drooping, body aching, he wanted nothing more than to lie down for a long rest but he was afraid that if he yielded even for a moment he would lose the will to act. The curse of his advancing years, years of loneliness and yearning since his life’s partner passed seven years prior, was that the pangs of conscience gave in too easily to rationalizations of indifference. If the world was determined to drive off the edge to unending nightmares, who was he to stand in the way?

He gathered the envelopes in his still trembling hands and made the drive to the nearest post office in Bisbee.

What happened in Ohio was very similar to what happened in Florida four years earlier but with a twist. In the days and weeks preceding the election, the numbers made it clear it would come down to Ohio. With the Secretary of State firmly in the Republican pocket, all the measures of disenfranchisement were in place: last-minute changes in polling locations, inadequate personnel and voting machines in black and Democratic districts, threats and challenges at the polling places, eviction of election monitors and the purging of black voters from the voting lists.

When it seemed, in the final hours, that all their efforts would be in vain, the call went out for Operation Chameleon to be executed and, along with it, the last remnants of American democracy would die.

On Election Day, Americans would see report after report of voter fraud in Ohio even after the exit polls announced a comfortable victory for John Kerry. Hundreds of voters would report witnessing the on-screen conversion of votes for Kerry into votes for George W. Bush. Thousands of disgruntled, protesting voters were told to fill out conditional ballots that would never be counted.

Despite a mountain of evidence, John Kerry conceded the election on November 6. To his supporters, it appeared that the operatives had convinced their candidate that he would go down in history as the man who saved American democracy by refusing to allow a repeat of the 2000 debacle.

The truth was infinitely more insidious. John Kerry and the younger Bush (like his father) were members of the same elite club of international overlords. They had carefully constructed the Kerry campaign so that he could carry on with the war in Iraq for four more years but in the final hours they decided they needed more. They required four more years of the neocon philosophy of perpetual war to seal their claim for permanent control of Middle Eastern oil. They wanted more than a Democrat could reasonably deliver.

In the final analysis, John Kerry was in on the fix and Simon Juneau held the smoking gun – compelling and incontrovertible evidence of deliberate and bipartisan election fraud: recorded conversations with Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, Walden O’Dell of Diebold Election Systems, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, George Bush and Kerry, himself.

If not for the trust they placed in him as a tried and true operative, if not for the part he played in Florida 2000, he would not have been in a position to document the greatest election fraud since the days of Tammany Hall or Richard Daley and the Chicago machine. He would have settled for watching Arizona sunsets over evening cocktails with coyotes and creatures of the desert as his only companions.

The Grand Old Party assumed Simon Juneau was one of them, a man so corrupted he was immune to moral constraint. It did not occur to them that even he had a line he would not cross and that line was drawn across the state of Ohio. He was astonished at the silence of the media and sickened that the political process was so poisoned that all the king’s men and women could witness the overt stealing of a presidential election and stand down.

He understood there was no distinction between parties and little distinction between the political establishment and Mafia crime families. Even those who played a part in the Kennedy assassinations recognized a line of restraint. Politics were always dirty on both sides of the aisle but there remained a line one did not cross. Now it seemed that line had ceased to exist.

So an elderly politico, guilty on so many levels of corruption and fraud, decided to take action. Despite everything he had done and everything he had witnessed and condoned by silent affirmation, he still considered himself a decent man. He believed in a divine presence. He believed that he was put on earth to do a job and to fulfill his destiny. He now believed his destiny was to blow the lid off a truth that sickened him to the core.

He felt like the Jews of Nazi Germany who survived the holocaust by "passing" as gentiles, even to the point of becoming card carrying members of the Nazi Party. If he could have stopped Hitler, he was certain he would have. If he could have stopped the assassination of a president, he would not have failed to act. He could do nothing to alter history but at this late stage of life, he was given a last chance at redemption and he took it.

What Simon Juneau did not know, as he deposited his envelopes in the mail drop of the Bisbee post office, was that his file, sans sweat and tears, was already in the hands of his adversaries and former colleagues. As much as he had adapted to the technological age, he did not realize how easily computer files were tapped, even when they were never sent over the web.

Later that evening, about one in the morning, when an old friend showed up with a couple of his lackeys, Simon knew exactly what was happening. The time for negotiation was closed. Sam Tilden was a man in a box. He was not empowered to make choices. Like an SS officer, he did what he was told. The only discretion his superiors allowed him was methodology.

Like Juneau, Tilden was an old timer, a veteran of political warfare, and he was familiar with Juneau’s work and reputation. Out of respect, he allowed the old master a few more hours of life. The lackeys waited outside while the old warriors settled by the fire to talk old times and lament that it all came down to this.

The hushed sounds of night, a warm breeze, the scent of sage and the cold blue light of a desert moon slipped though open balcony doors with a majestic view of the desert night.

"Where there is no honor," reflected the killer, "there can be no satisfaction."

"Yes," replied Juneau. "And all the satisfaction we once felt in a job well executed has withered like an old man’s desire."

"Speak for yourself," said Tilden.

Tilden was no fool. He knew better than to become infected by the disease that killed Simon Juneau. He made a choice long ago to let go of his conscience. The best he could do was to deliver fate with some small measure of grace.

He produced a small leather pouch from his breast pocket, pulled out a capsule and poured the contents into Juneau’s finest red wine. Within minutes, Juneau’s mind was drifting through a maze of memories until it settled on one last thought: his last act, his assertion of conscience and his redemption now rested in the words printed on two envelopes in the Bisbee post office: The Editor of the New York Times and John Sinclair, Esquire.

He smiled at the thought and let his spirit float away.

Simon Juneau was dead.