Thursday, February 07, 2008

Election theft 2008, the perfect crime: 300 million witnesses and nobody saw nuttin'
by Warren Pease
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, former CIA director, at his first staff meeting in 1981.
The great election theft of 2008 began months ago as the "unelectable" candidates were identified, branded, demonized, ridiculed and eventually weeded out one by one. It ended on January 30 when John Edwards, resurgent neo-populist and the last remaining bane of status quo oligarchs, dropped out of the Democratic presidential race.
Only six states had a chance to make their selections known before Edwards ended his campaign; residents in the other 44 have no progressive alternative on the ballot. With "super Tuesday" coming up, millions of voters will be asked to choose among candidates from the moderate right, the corporate right, the religiously insane right or the Curtis LeMay right.
So, through deft manipulation of voter attitudes by mass media, status quo corporatists and oligarchs can't really lose. This outcome may not meet the standard for election theft, but the results speak for themselves. Our ruling aristocracy has hijacked another critical election cycle, and they didn't even need electronic vote switching, voter caging, voter roll purging, deceptive mailers, stolen or destroyed ballots, access to proprietary source code, hacking for the GOP or simple understaffing in progressive precincts. At least not yet.
Nope. This variation on election theft just required that people turn their televisions to any of the conventional mass media news outlets -- notably Fox, CNN or MSNBC -- find a political talk show or panel discussion or rant fest, and internalize the labels attached to some of this year's presidential candidates: "controversial," "unelectable," "unconventional," "goofy," "loser," "weird," "outside the American mainstream," "radical." The candidates not so labeled are, by definition, the serious contenders and therefore the only ones we need to watch.
LINK TO CON.

No comments: