An Absentee Ballot for JonBenet Ramsey PART ONE by JR McCarthy

The Presidential election of 2008 remains too close to call. This is as it should be, with more than one hundred days until a ballot is cast, with the presumptive candidate of the Democratic party still a little bloodied from primary season, and with the Republicans still not quite sure what to make of their standard bearer. One hundred days is the blinking of an eye as we go about our lives, but given the volatility of the times, and the omnipresence of the media, it is an eternity for Senators Obama and McCain.

The Presidential election of 2008 remains too close to call. This is as it
should be, with more than one hundred days until a ballot is cast, with
the presumptive candidate of the Democratic party still a little bloodied
from primary season, and with the Republicans still not quite sure what
to make of their standard bearer. One hundred days is the blinking of
an eye as we go about our lives, but given the volatility of the times,
and the omnipresence of the media, it is an eternity for Senators
Obama and McCain.

It is true that most pollsters give the advantage to Senator Obama, but
by no more than five percentage points, with at least ten percent of the
electorate undecided. It is likewise put forth that Obama is ahead of
Senator McCain in the count of committed electoral votes, but more
than half of the necessary 270 electoral votes are still up for grabs in
thirteen so-called swing states.

One of the thirteen states said to be as yet uncommitted is the
Centennial State, Colorado.
Denver, the largest city in Colorado, will, at the end of August, host the
Democrats. They will hold a four-day convention in the great city of
Denver so that they can tell the world what the world already knows:
that Barack Obama is their candidate for President of the United
States. A convention as perfunctory will take place in St. Paul,
Minnesota, during the first week of September, so that the
Republicans can elevate John McCain. Both political parties seek to
monopolize the attention of as many Americans as possible with their
National Conventions ? and their National Conventions are fixing to tell
those Americans virtually nothing that they have not already heard.

The Democratic Party will spend millions of dollars ceremoniously
removing the word "presumptive" from the candidacy of Senator
Obama, and the behemoth news media will bring us every empty
moment of the process - unless something happens that is either
sufficiently terrible or sufficiently wonderful enough to pre-empt
coverage. Democrats throughout the country, for Obama's sake, if not
for the sake of the commonweal, should be praying that no such
stories break. Given the ugly contentiousness that reigned during the
primaries, democrats throughout the nation may already be praying
that nothing they do not anticipate ? and thus nothing newsworthy ?
will happen in Denver, Colorado at the end of August.

At the beginning of August, August 6th to be exact, someone will
mark, and surely someone ought to mark, the eighteenth anniversary
of the birth of JonBenet Ramsey. JonBenet Ramsey would have been
eligible to vote in the Presidential Election of 2008, but on December
26th, as the Bush family marks its last Christmas in the White House,
the Ramsey family will mark the twelfth anniversary of JonBenet's as-
yet unsolved murder, which took place in Boulder, Colorado, twenty-
five miles north of Denver.

The most conservative estimates acknowledge that District Attorney's
Office of Boulder County, Colorado has spent between eight and
twelve million dollars, over the course of almost twelve years, in its
attempt to bring whoever killed JonBenet Ramsey to justice. The
excruciating details of the murder of this little girl are recently in the
headlines once more, because cutting-edge technology in the
identification of "Touch DNA" has prompted the Boulder D.A. to
announce that no member of JonBenet's immediate family remains
under suspicion for her death. This revelation, such as it is, more or
less places the status of the investigation where it was in the weeks
following December 26th, 1996. Twelve years later, this, and little
more, is what they have ascertained:

1. Six year old JonBenet Ramsey was murdered, somewhere in her
family's Boulder residence, at some time after midnight on the morning
of December 26th, 1996.

2. An autopsy confirmed that the cause of the child's death was
asphyxiation, brought on by garroting, and blunt trauma to the head,
such trauma consistent with the bashing of the head against a hard
and curved surface.

3. The same autopsy found evidence that the child was probably
the victim of chronic sexual abuse.

4. The condition of the clothing in which the child's body was found
indicates that the child was sexually assaulted on the night she was
murdered.

5. The condition of the clothing and the back of the child's head
indicate that the body of the child had been dragged for a
considerable distance.

6. Two separate samples of DNA taken from two separate articles
of the child's clothing are themselves matched, but do not match with
DNA samples taken from any of the three members of the child's family
who were present in the house at the time of her death.

7. The child's body was discovered by her father at approximately
one o'clock on the afternoon of December 26th, in a windowless room
located in the basement of the 16,500 square foot home. Her father
moved the body out of that location and up into the living room before
investigators from the Boulder County Sheriff's office could confirm the
location of the discovery, but a cursory examination led them to
conclude that the child had been dead for at least seven hours.

8. Although a long and rambling ransom note had been left for the
family, the discovery of which prompted the notification of the police in
the first place, no sign of forced entry were detected anywhere in the
house. A window with a broken lock, leading into the basement, and
located a short distance from the place where the body was allegedly
found, was covered with cobwebs inside and out at the time of the
initial investigation of the premises.

Primarily on the strength of new DNA evidence, especially the
aforementioned testing of "touch-samples", the Boulder D.A.'s Office
apologized to JonBenet's family for their rush to judgment, and stated
that they were pursuing the theory that an intruder assaulted and
murdered the child.

Here, astonishingly, matters stand.

Barack Obama comes this August to the state where JonBenet
Ramsey was murdered with a war chest in excess of 265 million
dollars. So great is the Obama campaign's proficiency at gleaning
donations from individual citizens that they are in a position to decline
federal matching funds. This is much to the chagrin of the McCain
campaign, who descry the fact that Obama is reversing his 2007
pledge to accept both taxpayer money, and the strictures such
financing entails, if his opponent would do the same. Obama's people
essentially say that the Senator has changed his mind in order to
protect himself from being swift-boated by special interests groups,
sympathetic to the Republicans, and willing to smear him without
implicating McCain. McCain's people resent such an insinuation, but
surely, they much more resent the prospect that Obama may be in a
position to spend at least three times as much as the 84 million made
available to each candidate by the public campaign financing system.

The truth seems to be that Obama has a little money to spare. He is
also obliged to spend the last week of August in the great state of
Colorado ? the state that has yet to charge anyone with the murder of
JonBenet Ramsey ? with no pressing business to attend to other than
an admittedly important speaking engagement. The Obama campaign
may well be in a position to outspend the McCain campaign, but there
is no doubt that they are in a position to outspend the District Attorney'
s Office of Boulder County. They could spend double what the D.A.'s
office has spent, and they would still have enough left over to fight the
special-interests groups and bail out the Clintons.

And were they to identify the responsible party in the murder of
JonBenet Ramsey, the Obama campaign would surely demonstrate
that they are "able to develop innovative approaches to challenge the
status quo and get results."

From the safety of my home, poring over periodicals and perusing the
internet, I chase after the political record and the personal convictions
of Senator Barack Obama. (I will get to you, Senator McCain.) I find
no substantial evidence that he is not a decent man and a sincere
public servant. Nor do I find even the shadow of a hope that I could
ever bring myself to vote for him. I am not a person of consequence,
but I could, through mighty effort, scrape together $2,300.00, which is
the maximum contribution that a citizen can make to a candidate for
federal office. I will make such a contribution to the coffers of Barack
Obama if he tells me who killed JonBenet Ramsey.

JR McCarthy is a published author and also a staff writer for ArtistsILove.com