Moscow on the State of Our Union

Recently I highlighted some of the incredible investigative work Brad at BradBlog has done regarding possible election fraud and related ongoing irregularities, including the suspicious death of an investigator from the Florida Inspector General's office. (If you haven’t read the original post, I highly recommend doing so—and if you happen to have a blog of your own, make some noise about it.)

Now, Brad reports:

[T]oday, it's The Moscow Times who joins the World's America Hating Party in a damning article suggesting the game is over and the forces of Democracy in the previously-Free World have lost.

So just what did this Moscow Times article have to say? Well, in addition to some fine reporting on Brad’s Clint Curtis coverage (summarized in my aforementioned earlier post), it said exactly what the American press has avoided saying, much to the detriment of our democratic process.

The re-election of President George W. Bush last November was a deliberately shambolic process that saw massive lockouts of opposition voters; unverifiable returns compiled by easily hackable machines operated by avowed corporate partisans of the ruling party; and vast discrepancies between exit polls and final results – gaps much larger than those that led elections in Ukraine and Georgia to be condemned as manipulated frauds. Indeed, a panel of statisticians said last week that the odds of such a discrepancy occurring naturally were 959,000 to 1, the Akron Beacon-Journal reported.

The copious documentation of the Bush fraud keeps growing. Last month, experts using actual machines and returns from the 2004 election showed Congress how a lone hacker could skew a precinct's results by 100,000 votes without leaving a trace.

So Congress was shown how the election could have been stolen, and not only do we hear nothing about it from Congress, but we have to go to Moscow to find out about it from the press. The article also notes that no significant moves have been made to rectify

the highly profitable degradation of the American electoral process -- beyond the appointment of yet another "blue-ribbon panel" of Establishment worthies to oversee "election reform." The seriousness of this endeavor can be seen in the man appointed to co-chair the effort: James Baker, the notorious Bush family fixer (and Saudi bagman) who spearheaded the sabotage of the 2000 vote in Florida. Baker's presence on the panel ensures that nothing will be done to lessen the ruling clique's chokehold on power.

Good night. (See Velvet Revolution’s press release calling for Baker’s resignation here.)

The last three paragraphs of the article are perhaps the most chilling, in no small part because they would never, ever, be found in an American newspaper—another reminder of the media’s complicity in the slow, downward spiral of the once-great American democracy.

So let's have no illusions about where we are. Gangsters are in charge, and nothing and no one will be allowed to challenge their dominion. They are waging aggressive war to cement their position and that of their allies: the energy barons, the arms merchants, the construction and services cartels, the investment bankers. These power blocs now command monstrous resources and unfathomable profits; they can buy out, buy off or bury any force that opposes them. Meanwhile, they use the loot of the stolen Republic -- its blood and treasure -- as fuel for their ever-expanding war machine: Bush now has a "secret watch-list" of 25 more countries ripe for military intervention, the Financial Times reported.

With more war crimes afoot, last month Bush issued an official "National Defense Strategy" that openly declares "judicial processes" as one of the enemies confronting the United States, actually equating them with terrorism, The Associated Press reported. Law is "a strategy of the weak," says the Bush Doctrine, in a chilling echo of Hitlerian machtpolitik: Might makes right. The judicial process must not be allowed to "constrain or shape" American behavior in any way, the gangsters declared.

Think of it: Law is now the enemy. Democracy, as we've seen above, is the enemy. This, the demented code of criminals and tyrants, has become the ruling doctrine of the United States -- replacing the Constitution, replacing the noble struggle for liberty and enlightenment with the howl of the beast, with a freak show of avarice and death.

Fuck.