Lou Dobbs, whom I respect half the time, finally reported on the highly suspect "irregularities" of one of the voting-machine companies, in this case, Sequoia. He mentioned the "problems" experienced by voters in Illinois who recently used Sequoia machines in the primaries.
I thought Lou's report was probably too good to be true, and it was. He immediately blamed all of the company's shady problems on the fact that they are now owned by a Venezuelan company. It's mighty convenient for Lou that Venezuela is ruled by that "horrible" socialist and "public enemy" No. 3 or 4 or 5, Hugo Chavez (who is no more a threat to us than Castro has been since November 1962 -- after the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended --, only Hugo has that highly addictive magic elixir, OIL, which makes the ultra rich take all leave of their senses, their ethics, their common sense, etc., at the mere mention of its name).
Yep, Lou found a foreign scapegoat to take the implied blame for "all" of America's voting "irregularities." Never mind the fact that those irregularities were almost certainly engineered by the Americans who owned the company long before the Venezuelans had even heard of it. It's also mighty convenient that Lou found this foreign scapegoat just in time to counter Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Rolling Stone article.
Yes, Lou, it's totally OK to ignore the far more serious and thoroughly proven criminal behavior of such one-hundred-percent American-owned companies as Diebold and ES&S.
Lou condemns American corporations, such as Big Oil, all the time, but he refuses to condemn the voting-machine companies. Why?
I think the answer is simple: Big Oil cannot hide its criminal behavior from the American people. We are victims of it every time we pull up to a gas pump. The Mainstream media cannot hide this truth from us. The criminal behavior of voting-machine companies, on the other hand, is supposed to be a secret. We are not supposed to know that we are being screwed every time we use one of their machines; therefore, the mainstream media is duty bound to continue to hide those horrible secrets at all costs -- unless there just happens to be a foreign "enemy" to use as a convenient scapegoat. The mainstream media probably wouldn't even have reported this fact if it hadn't found it necessary to conduct damage control in the wake of Kennedy's article.
Yes, I am just speculating, but the timing is amazing. It has been public knowledge for a while that a Venezuelan company owns Sequoia. Why did Dobbs wait until now a day or two after Kennedy's article, to attack them?
Update June 7, 2006: On the June 5, episode of Lou Dobbs, reporter Kitty Pilgrim said, "The big worry for U.S. elections is Smartmatic and other voting machine companies are private companies. They have proprietary software that they can call a trade secret. Electronic voting experts with extensive experience say it's nearly impossible to verify if a proprietary system is tamper-proof... Some voter watchdog groups and others in congress are calling for a full review and say the ownership of all electronic voting companies should be reviewed to determine if it poses a risk to U.S. elections."
I got the above Pilgrim quotes from "Hannan," a commenter at BradBlog. I replied to him as follows:
"I just read Hannan's Kitty Pilgrim quotes after I made my previous comment. I didn't watch Lou Dobbs yesterday (after being frustrated with last week's report), so I must commend Kitty Pilgrim on making such helpful comments. That is encouraging.
"Wildly wishful thinking: Maybe she and Dobbs (or at least Pilgrim alone) are ever so carefully -- deviously -- working their way around CNN's neocon censors. Maybe their report on foreign (or at least Venezuelan) ownership of a voting-maching company is merely the trojan-horse method of talking about the electronic-voting scandal in this country.
"Yes, as I say, that is wildly wishful thinking. The skeptic, the optimist and the realist in me are equally powerful (or weak), and every day, all day long, they battle it out with one another like the Three Stooges during Happy Hour."
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4 comments:
The timing is interesting, isn't it? I am terribly disappointed in Lou Dobbs, who seems to have lost all objectivity and has become an apologist for isolationism, if not the right wing. It's also interesting that Lou Dobbs' program competes with Chris Matthews' on MSNBC, another "journalist" whose politics have moved significantly to the right. Just a thought.
Kennedy's Rolling Stone piece certainly was telling. What's even more frightening is that, if not stopped, the GOP will "win" in the same way in '06 and '08. Greg Palast has a column at BuzzFlash, explaining the way he believes the votes were stolen from Kerry, in Ohio, in '04. Here's a link to Palast:
how they stole Ohio - Greg Palast
kiki, I actually read the Palast article at BuzzFlash last night. We must operate in the same circles.
I don't know if you've seen the following online documentary or not, but it is well worth your time (about an hour). Palast is one of the many people profiled. Even though you may already know much of what is going on in this country, be prepared to be angry and depressed at the same time as you watch. It receives positive reviews from 79 percent of the reviewers listed at Rotten Tomatoes.
Note: These files seem to work better if you download them to your computer before playing them; at least that's the case on my computer.
Orwell Rolls in His Grave
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Personally, I don't think Dobbs is anti-immigrant (except with respect to those who come here illegally), although he is clearly and irrationally anti-United Nations (to the point of framing them for things they either didn't do or of which they are only minimally guilty, which irritates me to no end; for instance, a government report finds that the U.S. -- especially Halliburton -- was far more guilty in the Iraqi "oil-for-food" scandal than was the United Nations, but Dobbs conveniently ignores those findings and continues to demonize anyone but the U.S.). With regard to illegal immigration, I think he is sincerely thinking of our economy and of the giant corporations that will do anything to replace high-wage American workers with low-wage foreign workers. In my blog entry, I am just trying to point out that Dobbs has once again found a convenient way to evade the undeniable fact that Americans (overwhelmingly republicans) -- not Venezuelans -- are stealing our elections. Why on earth would Venezuelans fix our elections so that the party that hates their president the most always wins?
[Note: I have decided to TRY to turn part of this reply in an actual blog entry. As I was writing just now, I had a sudden idea that is just too intriguing to relegate to my comments section. :-) We'll see if I have the umph and the gumption to give it the attention it deserves.]
I will await your next entry and am cheering you on. I just have to add that I have great admiration for Hugo Chavez and I consider it a positive move South America is taking toward the left.
kiki, you may not agree one hundred percent with my next entry. I don't think you will cast me in with the lions, or anything, but you might sic [sp?] your house cat on me. ;-) It might give you a new perspective, though. I think I should just keep it short and simple. I tend to add too many clauses and etceteras to my entries, and so they keep growing like crazy, even after I think I am done writing them (my thoughts simply have too much yeast in them; ha).
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