A film that graphically shows how Robert Mugabe's supporters rigged Zimbabwe's election has been smuggled out of the country by a prison officer. It is believed to be the first footage of actual ballot-rigging and comes as Zimbabwe's president faces growing international pressure.Read More...
In a great article in The Guardian, "Clinton Has Run Her Campaign The Same Way Bush Has Run The Country", Gary Younge quite aptly compares Hillary's modus operandi with that of Bush, pointing out the same willingness to lie to voters and distort reality (along with a whole host of other ills like fearmongering and exploiting racism) to further their political agendas. He starts off by setting the groundwork, "In her cynicism-sustained attempt to defeat Obama, she has shown contempt for intelligence, decency and democracy." Even though he is on the other side of the pond, he gets right what the MSM (with the exception of Olbermann) have failed to grasp:
As the primary season draws to a close it has become increasingly apparent that Hillary Clinton has run her campaign with the same contempt for intelligence, decency and democracy that Bush has run the country. Like the Bush administration, her campaign has been sustained by cynicism, divisiveness and fear-mongering, leaving a toxic and rancorous rift in its wake. Like the White House, her aim has been to win at all costs. And like the White House, it has produced the same result. Failure.Younge then proceeds to explain her dance of deception and hypocrisy over Michigan and Florida, and how she unabashedly switched her entire position on those primaries when it served her political interest to do so (and amazingly the MSM here in America never points this very important fact out):
It is a continuum not of policies - on that front she is closer to Barack Obama than either of them would concede - but a mindset that has served America ill these past seven years. Creating a bespoke reality out of whole cloth and then hoping people will not just buy it, but wear it.
But then she won both. Now everything is different. Speaking before a crowd of senior citizens in Boca Raton, Florida, last week she went into metaphorical hyperbole, comparing the battle to seat the delegates from Florida and Michigan to the suffragettes, the civil rights movement and Zimbabwe - where more than 40 people have been killed in election-related violence. "We're seeing that right now in Zimbabwe," she explained to a crowd of senior citizens. "Tragically, an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people. So we can never take for granted our precious right to vote."I would also like to add that in order for her to win the popular vote, not only would she have to count the discounted Michigan primary, she would have to give Obama ZERO votes in the entire state, even though it is clear that over 40% voted against her, and that the vast majority of those would go to Obama (and the rest mostly to Edwards, who now supports Obama).
Clinton insists she is winning the popular vote. She's right. But only if you tally votes with the same degree of selectivity as Robert Mugabe. For her claim to make sense, you would have to count the discounted Florida and Michigan primaries and discount the legitimate caucuses in Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington state, three of which Obama won. These four states do not reveal popular vote totals. It's like saying if you include your goals that were ruled offside and don't recognise your opponents' headers (it is football [soccer] after all) then you really won the game.
The reason Clinton has had to resort to this sophistry reveals another trait she shares with Bush - hubris. She believed she would have the nomination sewn up by Super Tuesday. She woke up on the following Wednesday out of money, ideas and volunteers. It was a month and nine contests before she won again. By then the momentum was Obama's and, though he has stumbled, he has been running with it since. By most reckonings he leads by about 190 delegates and 400,000 votes. Even if Michigan and Florida were counted, she would still trail in delegates.
Now I’ve heard some say that counting Florida and Michigan would be changing the rules. I say that not counting Florida and Michigan is changing a central governing rule of this country, that whenever we can understand the clear intent of the voters, their vote should be counted.Okay, so let's set aside your utter hypocrisy here, since you and your top aids supported stripping both states of their delegates when the DNC voted, and you had it within your power to stand up for the voters then but didn't. Let's look past that and look at that last part, "whenever we can understand the clear intent of the voters, their vote should be counted." Okay, so 40% of voters in Michigan CLEARLY did not want to vote for you, so how should that "clear intent" (can't get much clearer than that) guide us? Well give half of those to Hillary! Apparently the best way to count the voters according to their clear intent, at least as far as hypocritical Hillary is concerned, means either:
And, like Bush, she has appealed to the basest instincts of the electorate to dig herself out of a hole. First came fear. "It's 3am in the morning and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the telephone [in the White House]," went her ad.And then he finishes with this, which really is the question we are left with:
Then there is racism. The most recent example of which was her claiming that Obama's "support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again", as evidence of her own viability. Later she would concede that equating "white" and "hard- working" was a "dumb comment".
Like the Bush administration, the issue is no longer whether she leaves the stage with her reputation irreparably tarnished, but what state she leaves it in and how many people she is prepared to take with her.
Let’s use a case study to find out who Hillary Clinton really is, to find out where her real values lie. The case we will be studying is Hillary’s attitude toward democracy.
This topic keeps coming up, mostly with respect to Florida and Michigan, where she won’t shut up about how much every voter’s voice deserves to count (nor should she, if she were genuine about it). However as we shall see (and this probably won’t be a shocker to anyone vaguely familiar with Hillary), she cares nothing about the voters, past the extent to which they can be used to further her political ambitions.
The first tussle over voters came weeks before the first vote was cast, before the Iowa caucus. Iowa had recently moved up its caucus date to maintain its status as the first state to vote, but this had the effect, intended or unintended, of making it much harder for students to participate, because the caucus now fell during their winter break. This would hurt Obama, who has always been favored by younger, college-educated crowds, and good for Hillary, who doesn’t do nearly as well with the younger, college-educated crowds. Now it should be made very clear from the start that these students are allowed by law to vote in Iowa, and indeed the law even allows for same day voter registration to make it that much easier for Iowa students to vote (because after all, who wants young adults to be apathetic?). And since these students spend 3/4 of the year living in Iowa, with most working in Iowa, and paying taxes and tuition in Iowa, they are obviously Iowa residents. So Obama, like all candidates, encouraged college students in Iowa who were legally allowed to vote to vote for him. Then we got a telling first glance at how Hillary would weigh voter rights against her own self-interest:
“This is a process for Iowans. This needs to be all about Iowa, and people who live here, people who pay taxes here.”
Two things are apparent here. A) She doesn’t want students who were originally from out of state, yet nevertheless are legally allowed to vote, spend at least 75% of the year in Iowa, work in Iowa and pay taxes in Iowa, to vote in Iowa. And B) By her own criteria the voters Obama and every other candidate, including her hypocritical self, are courting should be allowed to vote, because as I’ve pointed out, they live in Iowa and pay taxes there (not to mention keep Iowa's higher education system afloat with their money), so she is not only trying to disenfranchise students, she is using the whole situation to try to make it seem like Obama is doing something underhanded by encouraging a historically underrepresented demographic of legal voters to exercise their democratic right by voting, thereby letting their voices be heard.
So we can clearly see, when voters get in the way of her political ambitions, their voices are unimportant, and shouldn’t be heard. This is especially callous given that young voters are for the first time in ages interested in politics and want to participate, and she responds by trying to stamp out their excitement. Unfortunately, this is a theme that will resurface again and again in this campaign.
After the Iowa caucus which Obama won by a large margin, and the New Hampshire primary, which Hillary narrowly won, came the Nevada caucus. At this point Hillary had already started to argue that caucuses were inherently undemocratic because they make it harder for some people to vote. She used this mostly as an excuse to explain why caucuses shouldn’t matter, because apparently caucuses unfairly target her demographic, white women aged 65+ who recently gave birth. Months before the Nevada caucus the rules were set, and all parties agreed that they were fair. These rules included a few extra caucus sites set up on the Las Vegas Strip to accommodate the large number of workers in that area who would otherwise be unable to vote due to time limitations or overfilled caucus sites. Good, everyone agreed that making it easier for voters to vote was good for democracy. Until the Culinary Union, which represents many workers on the Las Vegas Strip endorsed Obama over Hillary that is. Within 48 hours of the union’s decision, the Nevada teacher’s union, which is headed by a bunch of Hillary supporters, filed a lawsuit against the state to have the Strip caucuses closed because they supposedly disproportionately helped Culinary Union members (thus helped Obama). Hillary and Bill supported them all the way. The lawsuit was eventually struck down and the caucuses went ahead as planned, and in the end Hillary actually got a boost from those caucus sites because the union turnout was low and didn’t tilt toward Obama as much as everyone thought it would. Suddenly those caucus sites were fair after all, and suddenly that caucus mattered, as opposed to all of the caucuses Obama won. Nevertheless, it shows that despite all of Hillary’s talk about the voters having their voices heard, when she thinks their voices may hurt her, she would rather them be silenced, and she’s willing to use legal action to do it.
As I’ve previously written, after Obama blew through Hillary’s Super Tuesday firewall, and after she had secured unopposed “victories” in Michigan and Florida, she reversed her previous stance of indifference concerning Michigan and Florida voters and began clamoring for their voices to be heard, she wanted them seated as is, even though she was the only candidate on the ballot in Michigan, and even though both elections were little more than name-recognition tests, which she easily won, since no other candidates were able to campaign in either state. So basically she was fine with having an information blockout imposed on both states, so she could benefit from the voters not having a real choice, and then afterwards she suddenly became the hero of freedom, fighting for democracy, fighting for the people, fighting for delegates from Michigan and Florida to be seated at the Democratic Convention!!! Suddenly Hillary is a champion of voters rights! Her and her supporters have repeatedly decried the horrible disenfranchisement of the voters in these two states, saying that she won’t stand for it. Yet she is against having them do a revote with fair access to information from both sides, because she wants her previous wins locked in so she doesn’t actually have to fight a fair fight, especially when polls show Obama would probably win in Michigan now.
And while this whole mess has been going on, and while she has continued to complain that caucuses (minus Nevada’s) don’t matter because they somehow inherently disadvantage her (and that every state Obama has won doesn’t matter for a whole slew of reasons), there has also been a superdelegate war going on. This is where the hypocrisy really starts to set in. She says that it is important that every voter be counted, because democracy is all about the voters, and they all deserve to have their voices heard…yet the voters have spoken, and they have chosen Obama. And since it is virtually impossible for Hillary to win the pledged (democratically elected) delegate race at this point, her only option is to use undemocratic superdelegates to usurp the voices of the voters, and hijack the democratic process so she can win.
Now it varies by state, but the most common estimate is that one superdelegate equals over 10,000 voters. So basically, while Miss Democracy is talking the talk about wanting ever voter to count, and how it would be travesty if their votes didn’t count, her campaign strategy involves basically stuffing the ballot box with 10,000 votes at a time until she can overcome the democratically elected vote and come out ahead of Obama. That is essentially her plan, and the only way she can hope to win after you strip away her twofaced rhetoric.
The only problem is, Obama is quickly catching up in superdelegates (although he has consistently said they should not under any circumstance override the will of the people), so her power grab is going to have to extend even deeper into anti-democratic territory, if that is possible. Oh but apparently it is possible, because today she came out with this telling statement:
"There are elected delegates, caucus delegates and super-delegates, all for different reasons, and they're all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever they choose," Hillary told Newsweek, when asked how she can win the nomination despite the current delegate math.
"Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with whomever they are pledged to. This is a very carefully constructed process that goes back years, and we're going to follow the process."
