From the French, coup, meaning a quick strike and état meaning state, and playing  on the similarity of  état and the word for head,  tête,  the concept describes a decapitating strike aimed at the top office-holders and leadership of a sitting government in order to quickly insert a rival power structure, a targeted blow at the head of state to enable a minority to upset the status quo maintained by the majority.

With the United States being a unity of fifty states, which under our Constitution function more like independent countries, with their own locally elected governments, a politically partisan recall orchestrated against the duly-elected governor, actively being organized in Arizona and Wisconsin, seems uncomfortably close to fulfilling every criteria of a coup d’état or as it is known in  Central America,  a golpe de estado.

No guns are required; this would be how lawyers and political organizers wage battle, bloodless and cold, not the heat of hand to hand combat on the front steps of the presidency and in the hallways of parliament, in these cases, in the lobbies of the Governor’s Offices and the State Legislatures. The weapon used would be a cynical application of legal processes meant to provide relief in a tyrannical or criminally abusive situation, but in 2011 seized by a disgruntled losing party of 2010 to effectively throw out the results of general elections, and by that, the votes of the majority of the people.

The open bragging during the press conference the day after the recall of Senator Pearce displayed what appeared to be grander objectives than previously argued by the recallers. The organizers and supporters had for months insisted it was a simple issue of Russell Pearce’s character alone, but literally within hours of his defeat, it was exposed that the recall vision went far beyond Russell. As articulated by the organizers of the recall, in their own words as public record, upon contemplation seems uncomfortably like a rather focused strike at the top office holders of the State of Arizona … or in international diplomatic parlance, something like a golpe de estado, to destroy the results of the November 2010 elections. The Recallers named names:

Senator Russell Pearce: President of the AZ Senate
Governor Jan Brewer
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio

Hmm. The laundry list appearance of it brings to mind dynamics which are common elsewhere in power struggles. The first two represent the highest levels of Arizona government, the governor’s office and the top of the legislative branch. Though not a state-wide office holder, Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s closest parallel in an actual independent nation would be a somewhat impartial chief of police or perhaps gendarmerie, not open to being swayed and with some wider popular public support, so in a classic coup d’état someone like him in that sort of position would have been pre-judged by coup plotters as an impediment to making such a strike to stick, and thus marked for removal.

The parallels are disconcerting or should be, but how many Americans have ever seen such political dynamics and would think of them?  What would make any Third World citizen sit up with alarm, goes unnoticed in First World … but many of what are called “Third World” used to be well on their way to “First World” until that first coup d’état smashed the electoral process by which the shared consensus of the people is normally established as to who has lawful authority to govern. Politics no longer was about the will of the People, but about whoever had the brute force to grab and keep the top offices, throwing political calculations into chaos.

Who can make alliances, coalitions, and consensus if the officer holders can be here today, gone tomorrow, with no warning? Shocked political office-holders at all levels react to this arbitrary uncertainty with a siege mentality of self-preservation, not by representing the People, so the entire system is degraded and damaged, top to bottom.

A recall denies an elected official their majority, voter-bestowed, lawful mandate to govern. A politically-motivated recall is never satisfied, because more than one office-holder has to go, demanding voters return again and again to defend their choices, exhausting voters, a cynical abuse of voters’ rights, budgets and energy.

In Wisconsin, the majority of the voters acting on their desire for change from decades of Democrat Party-controlled stagnation decisively put Scott Walker into the governor’s office. Yet, not even twelve months into his term, infuriated Democrats have dumped a massive stack of signatures of petitioners for a recall of him, and are feverishly working on a system-clogging million signatures from people who seemingly absolutely positively cannot live another minute with Walker as governor, an expected over twice the number required for the recall trigger, an astounding figure give the population of the state, and completely counter-intuitive to the plain will of the majority only twelve months ago.

Arizonans, who pooh-pooh any real threat to popular Governor Jan Brewer, should take what’s happening right now in Wisconsin to heart, as an open call to begin collecting signatures against her was made by Recall organizers in their press conference after Pearce’s defeat. The Democrat Party recallers in Wisconsin seem to be using the same script as the recallers here used against Pearce in Arizona; that they do not have any challenger as yet to Scott Walker, but they expect someone will step forward … what, a million signatures and not a thought of who would be governor if the governor is ripped out?

Walker had to campaign to all the people of the state of Wisconsin, he had to convince them he would carry their will through the governor’s office and the majority liked what they heard from him and voted him in. The Democrats want to put in a nobody? Someone the voters don’t know, haven’t had a chance to vet, and who necessarily would be voted in by fewer than the majority which Scott Walker required to win in the general election? How about a political neophyte with no experience, no record to examine, perhaps? Someone who the voters would have no idea what he or she would do once in office? What nonsense! Who would go for that? Russell Pearce banked on that common sense and he’s abruptly out of a job.

One wonders where those million were just last November. The sheer magnitude and practical feasibility of collecting a million signatures in such little time alone should provoke questions. If there were truly that many motivated, disgruntled opposing voters, then Walker wouldn’t have been elected in the first place, but there they are … upstanding Wisconsin residents including Mickey Mouse and Adolph Hitler could be the means by which a duly elected governor of an American state be ripped from office.

The GAB Petition Review board in Wisconsin overseeing this have publically shrugged; they stated that Mickey Mouse and Adolph Hitler if signed on the petition will stay on the petition so long as they have a valid Wisconsin zip code, unless Governor Walker challenges them, one by one. With a projected over a million signatures and only so many days, the Democrats seem to be supremely confident it isn’t physically possible for Walker to verify the validity of the signatures to lodge a protest, and the checks and balances of a supposedly impartial petition review board are not in evidence, to the detriment of Governor Walker.

Governor Scott Walker should feel vindicated that his rabid political opponents include the likes of Adolph Hitler, proving once and for all that the socialist Hitler is not and has never been politically or ideologically affiliated with Republicans in any measure, but there is no time to laugh out loud and the threat to our Constitutionally-established system of elections is too grave.

If the Democrats succeed in their recall strike at Walker, to haul him out of office long before his mandated term ends, then the socialist Hitler will have done what no one else has achieved, overthrown the existing political system, risen to power TWICE by raw manipulation of the lawful systems, and from the dead, no less. In Wisconsin, Democrats have actually physically inserted Mickey Mouse into the metaphor for a complete, bad electoral joke.

Ominously for 2012, instead of focusing on the presidential election, every local state and national popularly-elected Republican official is at risk of being embroiled in a two-front political war, harassed from the rear and the front by the Democrats who are increasingly remote from and hostile to the will and spirit of the majority, and cannot provide a political vision and governing competency which attracts voters in normal elections.

Instead of taking a hard look at the validity of their premises and philosophies, Democrats seemed to have cast their lot to invest in recalls, a decidedly undemocratic and tyrannical solution to ballot-box failure, via an increasingly well-oiled and organized blitzkrieg designed to overwhelming and stripping out Republicans in state after state sitting governments, as easily as Hitler’s tanks once overran the horse soldiers of unprepared Poland, a nation whose main fault was that it was prepared for the previous, non-mechanized war, not the one that ground them under the tank treads.   Immigrants, legal and illegal have long viewed America as a haven from this sort of political disaster, how tragic that they are being asked to facilitate the introduction of the chaotic conditions they fled.

Mickey Mouse and Hitler in Wisconsin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tELtKMPKAq4