LAST RIGHTS (Moscow Times)

[cprise]

By Chris Floyd


Once again, the dispiriting spectacle of the American media in full campaign cry is upon us, as coverage of the 2004 presidential race begins in earnest. But this time around, the usual inanities, inaccuracies and insipidities have a more melancholy flavor, an almost elegiac feel. It's like watching priests of a dead cult, vacantly enacting their rituals in a ruined temple whose gods have been broken, desecrated and cast down.

The difference from past campaigns lies in the media mandarins' sad belief that there will actually be a genuine, open, presidential election in November 2004. This childlike faith stems, of course, from their equally fallacious conviction that the United States did not suffer a coup d'etat in December 2000 at the hands of an extremist faction of elites.

Although the installation of second-place finisher George W. Bush was engineered in a wholly unprecedented and unconstitutional manner -- from the illegal purging of more than 90,000 eligible, predominantly black voters from the Florida rolls by Jeb Bush to the violent mobs of Republican congressional staffers paid by George Bush to break up the vote recounts in Miami to the threats of military insurrection muttered by Bush Family factotum General Norman Schwarzkopf to the use of Republican-paid ex-CIA operatives to "correct" 15,000 Florida absentee ballots to the Supreme Court ruling that unlawfully halted the Florida recount by citing a totally fictitious deadline for final tallies, down to the congressional session that officially "ratified" the election result, held in an half-empty chamber lacking the legally required quorum -- America's media leaders insist there was no coup because power was transferred "without tanks in the streets."

more!
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2003/09/12/120.html

[Oggy]

1. Good find

Very well written, lets hope the last section is wrong, but I fear it is right.

[cprise]

4. The "They have too much to lose" part...

Maybe, maybe not. Neocons still get away with a lot under Democratic presidents, plus much of their prior mess is mopped-up to boot.

The current Democratic leadership wants to prove they can fill this kind of water-boy role, so a true leader emerging in the primaries will tend to be attacked by the party apparatus itself.

In order to have a legitimate Democratic president (at least this time around), this leader would have to go beyond putting neo-cons in check and launch an offensive to strip them of their ill-gotten money and influence (although it should not be anti-Republican per-se). He would also have to make some unpopular decisions early on in order to actually lead this country back toward a civil multi-party and multilateralist frame of mind. Total privatization is on the neocons lips, a political extremism in the same league as communism: The president would be duty-bound to split this nasty outgrowth from the rest of the Republicans... shine a light on their bigotry and greed nd drive the wedge so deep as to relegate the neocons to the same status as Aryan Nation, because those two groups are two sides of the same extremist coin (read http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/story/0,12576,1040340,00.html">Berlusconi article).

The question is would the press allow it, knowing their recent history? How much have Americans broken away from mass media? Would a strong but fair Democrat need to push for a true public broadcasting system using the BBC's license-fee scheme to bring a populist balance to the media?

We must push back strategically and hard against the military-media complex to prevent a trend of increasingly-worse Berlusconis and Blairs in our country.

[KoKo]

5. cprise, could you post this out in GD Forum with alert to Bev Harris BBV!

I think it should get some attention out there since this is what the whole issue of the Touch Screen Machines not having paper trails is about.

This is an excellent article....and it had to come from Moscow Times, fgs! Hopefully some folks in GD will find it as interesting as hacking away at each other's political candidates.....

It's too good, not to try to have more "eyeballs" see it!

[cprise]

6. Eloriel had posted this in GD

but stuff there sinks pretty fast.

[rooboy]

2. Excellent piece, thanks for posting. n/t

[tom_paine]

3. Man, what a sign that things are out of whack in the Empire

When the goddmaned Moscow Times is making sense!

God, that's awful, but man it seems like they have us pegged.

Remember when we had the right to be contemptuous of the pathetically propagandized Soviets and their sheep-like acceptance of Lying Tyranny?

Shoes on the other foot now, ain't it? And it doesn't feel so good.

Except to the propagandized jaded, post-ironic, harried, hurried Imperial Subjects of Amerika.

They don't feel anything beyond their personal lives unless the TV tells them 12 times
tells them 12 times
tells them 12 times
tells them 12 times