With all the talk about Iraq and Afghan elections, time to bring back this

[AP]

A few weeks ago I posted the following. Incidentally, I got the guy's age wrong. He's in his early 50s, not late 50s. Reading between the lines, it's so obvious these "elections" are only being held so that Bush can say that they had elections. What doesn't matter to Bush is whether there's any real democracy in Iraq or Afghanistan. Someone ought to tell Wolf Blitzer about this story. Here's the post:

Here's what they're going to have him do: guard ballot boxes during elections.

Ie, he's not going to build things. He's just going to be a sitting duck.

His family is devastated.

He got his two-week training in Iraq, came home for a couple weeks, and is headed back soon.

He says that every time they have an election in Iraq, the winner goes into hiding and that's the last he's seen or heard from. He says the elections they have are a joke. These elected representatives have no relationship or communication with the people who elected them after they've been elected. It's just done so they can say they had a democratic election. They have to hide them so that they don't have to have new elections to replace a bunch of (inevitably) assassinated people.

What they're doing over there isn't about democracy. It's about a facade of democracy so that Bush can get reelected.

Meanwhile, real people -- including 58 year old engineers -- are risking their lives for this fraud.

Now, for all the NYT and Washington Post, and other reporters out there reading this: "was that so hard?" I didn't even go looking for this story. It found me. I don't get paid to do this. It isn't my job to relate the truth to the public. Yet I just learned more about what's really going on in Iraq than you'd get from reading 5 years of the New York Times.

Why even have newspapers and tv news if they can't even do what I just did for free in my leisure time?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2410649