Thursday, January 31, 2008

Get Ready For President McCain

Looks like John McCain is going to be the next President of the United States.

Most probably he will cinch the GOP nomination.

That means this November, he will be running against either a woman or a black man. (Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.)

This still being America, it seems unlikely that a woman or a black man can beat a white male. Especially a "war hero."

McCain of course is deeply reactionary, contrary to his media-created image. (The corporate media always hides the truth about their reactionary front men.  They did it with Nixon, Ford, Reagan, the Bushes, and innumerable others.)

McCain is against the right of human beings to control their own bodies- if they happen to be women. That is, women must be forced to bear children against their will if they get pregnant.

He's also a very aggressive, dyed-in-the-wool U.S. Imperialist. Recently he said the U.S. may have to keep forces in Iraq for a hundred years. He didn't think there was anything particularly wrong with this, either.

McCain's incessantly self-touted (and the corporate media echoes him) qualifications seems to boil down to this: he flew a plane, he bombed 
the Vietnamese, he got shot down, and he was a prisoner for a few years. Somehow that makes him an expert 
in foreign policy and military strategy. Go figure.

Of course all the candidates acceptable to the establishment are Imperialists like McCain. Some are less aggressive about it. The ones who actually talked an anti-Imperialist line (implicitly, not explicitly), Ron Paul, Mike Gravel, and Dennis Kucinich, are media nonpersons. Since most Americans are sheep who follow the media, this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of marginalizing the "marginal" candidates. It's still only a minority who can break the mental chains and think for themselves.

No candidate who wishes to be deemed "viable" by the propaganda system can offer an alternative to imperialism as the continuing modus vivendi of America, or to challenge the tyranny of corporate oligarchy.
Those who do, whether from inside the two-party dictatorship that fronts for the corporate oligarchs, 
or outside it, as most recently Ralph Nader tried to do, have their candidacies suffocated by a
 media blackout, which is standard operating procedure.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Imran Khan is a Jackass

   A Pakistani cricket player named Imran Khan got the kid glove treatment in an interview on Democracy Now by Amy Goodman. Khan fancies himself the next President of Pakistan.
 [www.democracynow.org for Jan 30, 2008]

   I didn't disagree with everything Imran Khan said today. Dictatorship bad, democracy good, he opined- who could disagree with that?

    
   But according to Khan, the U.S. "drove the Taliban into Al-Qaeda's arms" What a dolt!  He also said the Taliban "inherited" Al-Qaeda. The Taliban are of the same ideological ilk as A-Q. That's why they sheltered them (it's not like A-Q were grandfathered in in Afghanistan and couldn't be expelled, as they were from Sudan, e.g.) and refused the U.S.' demand after 9/11/01 to hand over bin Laden and the other terrorists behind the attacks of that day.

   Oh, and how undemocratic for the U.S. to support the Northern Alliance, he added! What, the Taliban are democrats?

   And what this fool had to say about the Pashtun terrorist-shelterers in Pakistan was equally obtuse. Apparently he would just keep allowing terrorists to run their global operations from inside Pakistan if he became President! To assert the rule of law in those provinces is "attacking the Pashtun people." If that's how the Pashtuns view it, then they NEED to be attacked. Khan was all bent out of shape about the Paki army going into part of Pakistan in violation of some dusty agreement the Pashtuns forced on the Government years ago. An agreement that any self-respecting government would abrogate as soon as it had the strength to do so. (In fact, the Pashtun terrorist-lovers just broke the most recent agreement, whereby the Pakis army would stay out if the Pashtuns stop harboring Al-Qaeda.)

   I guess some people (leftists, e.g.) think it's ok for Islamic nuts to blow up trains and bridges and whatever in Europe, America, and everywhere else they don't like something. The truth is, Musharraf has run a scam and protection racket on the U.S. Instead of invading Iraq, the U.S. needed to attack Pakistan. THAT'S the country that was and is harboring the terrorists that Bush et al claim to be fighting. Since the Pakistan Government doesn't really control the territory anyway, their claims of sovereignty are purely pro forma. Musharral used most of the
"counterterrorism" money on weapons to use against India.

   It's time to end this charade and nuke Pashtunistan if necessary. Too bad the U.S. sided with these medieval reactionary scum in Afghanistan instead of letting the Soviets deal with them. The U.S. created this situation in alliance with the Pakis and Saudis. It's time to bite the bullet and go to the mat with them. The Bush gang are a bunch of phonies. Iraq was irrelevant to the "war on terror," until Bush created a front for them by destabilizing Iraq and opening it up to them.  

[See New York Times, "U.S. Officials See Waste in Billions Sent to Pakistan,"
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/world/asia/24military.html?scp=7&sq=pakistan+military&st=nyt
"Militants Escape Control of Pakistan, Officials Say,"  
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/world/asia/15isi.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=pakistan+aid&st=nyt&oref=slogin
"Doubts Engulf an American Aid Plan for Pakistan,"
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/world/asia/25pakistan.html?pagewanted=2&sq=pakistan%20aid&st=nyt&scp=2

Thursday, January 10, 2008

NY Times continues coverup of GOP election frauds

The august New York Times ran a major article in their Sunday magazine section on January 6, 2008, by one Clive Thompson, which purports to expose "problems" with so-called "electronic voting machines."

Clive Thompson explains the problem with electronic voting machines as one of poor computer code which is prone to error and hacking. If that is so, why in EVERY CASE do the machines HURT DEMOCRATS AND HELP REPUBLICANS?? The machines are used to STEAL ELECTIONS from Democrats. That would not be the case if the problem were random errors or glitches. That one simple fact refutes entirely Thompson's angle and thesis. (Which was obviously preordained by the paper's editors, who gave Thompson his marching orders.)

The REAL story is the conspiracy by the GOP and their business allies to steal elections by programming the software to steal votes. Many voters have seen their votes switched before their eyes. The switching only goes one way, ever.

Thompson may be feigning naivete, or he may really be that stupid that he doesn't see that obvious fact.

Of course the NY Times, which hired Thompson to do this VERY BELATED article (the Times has been blacking out the scandal for years until recently- guess they've decided that Bush was a disaster for U.S. Imperialism and a mismanager of corporate capitalist oligarchy too, so they want a Dem Pres this time), has a powerful interest in hiding the fact that U.S. elections are crooked and illegitimate. They NEVER reported the massive voter fraud by the GOP in Florida in 2000 or in Ohio in 2004, only part of which involved the fixed voting machines.

The problem isn't one of inadequate technology. The problem is one of fraud. If it were the other way around, Republicans would be getting cheated out of elections. They never are.
The NY Times actively undermined the candidacies of both Gore and Kerry, who they subjected to ridicule. This revealed their political agenda. Not that the Dems are Good Guys. They're merely less evil than the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers).

See also the interview with former Republican operative Allen Raymond, "How to Rig an Election: Convicted Former GOP Operative Details 2002 New Hampshire Phone Jamming Scheme," at
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/8/how_to_rig_an
_election_convicted


Raymond, who served time in federal prison for jamming phone lines of the New Hampshire Democratic Party in 2002 to block a Democratic get-out-the-vote campaign, has come out with a tell-all book called How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative. In addition to the phone-jamming scheme, Raymond details other Republican tactics such as the use of scripted, phony automated phone messages to try to play on white voters’ racial prejudices in a 2000 New Jersey congressional race.