Election Skullduggery

Cut From The Frozen North To The Tropics…

'08/12 Election, Election Skullduggery, Poverty, Russia, South America, War on Terror, Wingnuts
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While the UK and US media are having a happy happy fun time decidering the election and the actual electorate gets more and more irate about it, banana republicanism and all round diplomatic skullduggery goes on as blithely as usual. In this particular instance, Venezuela, it may have electoral implications – but perhaps that’s the plan.

The supposedly lame-duck Bush administration is continuing to destabilise neighbouring countries for fun and profit by fomenting dissent and plotting coups:

President Hugo Chávez last night ordered the US ambassador to leave Venezuela within 72 hours and accused Washington of fomenting a coup attempt against his socialist revolution.

Chávez also ordered Venezuela’s ambassador to Washington to return home and threatened to cut oil supplies, plunging relations between the countries to a new low. “Go to hell a hundred times, fucking Yankees,” he told a televised rally thronged with supporters clad in red.

The move came a day after Venezuela’s ally Bolivia expelled its US ambassador for allegedly backing opposition groups engaged in bloody clashes with police and government supporters; turmoil which claimed eight lives and split the country in two.

[…]

In a day of intrigue and brinkmanship, Chávez announced that Venezuelan military officers had plotted to assassinate him with US complicity. “They’re trying to do here what they were doing in Bolivia. That’s enough shit from you Yankees,” he said.

Ties would be restored when the US had a new government that “respected” Latin America, he added.

Coincidental or not, his accusation fell on the 35th anniversary of the CIA-backed coup which replaced Chile’s leftist president, Salvador Allende, with the dictator Augusto Pinochet.

The American diplomatic and security apparatus has learned precisely nothing from Chile. They think that it’s still the 1970s in South America: the cold war has never ended there for them.

It’s all beginning to look rather Georgian, or even Bay of Pigsian, isn’t it, what with the Russian navy conducting war games off the coast of Venezuela and Russian bombers at South American bases and everyone taking sides:

Russian bombers arrive in Venezuela

Russia has flown two long-range bombers to Venezuela for military exercises, a move likely to cause concern in Washington.

Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, said on Wednesday that the Tu-160 strategic bombers had arrived to strengthen military ties and to counter US regional influence.

Apart from the larger geopolitical political implications there are domestic US electoral considerations too, in light of the bellicose attitude being expressed shown by McCain/ Palin towards Russia. United against a common enemy and all that…

The Bush administration definitely seems to have a strategy; it’s armageddon or bust. Trouble in South America, the Caucasus, the Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan -any one of of those situations could ripen into regional and perhaps global war, given the right sequence of events. Surely one’s got to pay off in time to give the Republicans a pre- election boost.

Is it just me or is there more than a whiff of October Surprise to all this?

This Is How They Do It

'08/12 Election, Bloody Lawyers, Democratic (in)action, Economy, Election Skullduggery, Poverty, Race, Sensible Liberals, US politics
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Lost everything in the recession? Foreclosed? Homeless? Well, now you’ve lost your vote too – Republican ratfuckery in Michigan, from the Michigan Messenger via the estimable Attaturk:

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Mich., a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the coming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed…

Carabelli is not the only Republican Party official to suggest the targeting of foreclosed voters. In Ohio, Doug Preisse, director of elections in Franklin County (around the city of Columbus) and the chair of the local GOP, told the Columbus Dispatch that he has not ruled out challenging voters before the election due to foreclosure-related address issues.

Now, why ever might they want to do that?

The Macomb County party’s plans to challenge voters who have defaulted on their house payments is likely to disproportionately affect African-Americans who are overwhelmingly Democratic voters.

There you go.

But of course being Republicans there’s always a particularly vicious and venal little twist:

…the McCain campaign’s Michigan headquarters is located in the office buildiing of Trott & Trott, a law firm that specialized in foreclosures, whose founder is a major Republican fund-raiser.

The dirty tricks have barely begun.

Colour Me Shocked – Yet Hardly Surprised

'08/12 Election, bigotry, Election Skullduggery, Merkins..., Race, Wingnuts, Women
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If what’s being reported is true, Sarah Palin is apparently a vicious racist as well as the class cow. But then, did I really ever think she’d be anything else?

From the LA Progressive [Via The Poor Man] comes this heartwarming story of everyday gubernatorial bigotry:

“So Sambo beat the bitch!”

This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama’s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

According to Lucille, the waitress serving her table at the time and who asked that her last name not be used, Gov. Palin was eating lunch with five or six people when the subject of the Democrat’s primary battle came up. The governor, seemingly not caring that people at nearby tables would likely hear her, uttered the slur and then laughed loudly as her meal mates joined in appreciatively.

“It was kind of disgusting,” Lucille, who is part Aboriginal, said in a phone interview after admitting that she is frightened of being discovered telling folks in the “lower 48” about life near the North Pole.

Then, almost with a sigh, she added, “But that’s just Alaska.”

Read whole thing

Well, there it is, racism in the raw out and on the table. Wherever do the campaigns go from here?

UPDATE:

An Alaskan anti-Palinist casts doubt on the allegations.

Read both and make your own mind up.

Interesting If True

'08/12 Election, Election Skullduggery, Internet, US politics, Wingnuts, Women
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Which of course it may not be, they’ve been wrong before. But then again it might.

Daily Kos: Breaking:Alleged Palin Affair w/ Husband’s Bus. Partner

Update & ObDisclaimer: as one of the commenters to this post points out this may be false flag strategy by the McCain campaign:

Promote the most outlandish stories.
Debunk them.
Obtain symparthy [sic] for Palin.
No one believes the true stuff.

He or she has a very good point: however I’m not sure that McCain’s people are that disciplined at this point. If true, that might really put the wind up the fundies; on the other hand they’ve shown their IOKIYAR reserves are just about inexhaustible. Whatever the outcome, you can tell I’m getting more than a little obsessed.

Update II

Curiouser and curiouser – one of the Right’s own organs, the NRO has taken up the story – is there an organised attempt to sink her from within the party?