Dissident Veteran For Peace: Anointing Biden & Election Irregularity Allegations II

Dissident Veteran For Peace

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." —Alexis de Tocquevile. Democracy in America, Book I, Chapter XV.

With a nod to the Most Rev. Dom Helder Camara: When I support Palestinians some call me an 'anti-Semite', when I try to explain why I stand in solidarity with Palestinians they call me a Nazi.

"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." —Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.)

"... no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end." —character of O'Brien in 1984, part 3, ch. 3 by George Orwell.

"Every prophet has realized that nobody loves you for being the enemy of their illusions. Every prophet has realized that most of us want peace at any price as long as the peace is ours and somebody else pays the price. That is why the prophet Jeremiah said, ' "Peace, peace," they say, when there is no peace,' ..." —The Rev. William Sloane Coffin. "Not to Bring Peace, But a Sword."

Monday, November 09, 2020

Anointing Biden & Election Irregularity Allegations II

The first election I remember with any clarity is the 1976 race between Ford and Carter. Since then I've participated in every presidential election, including two where I served as a precinct officer.

Over and over, every four years, I've heard people say: "This is the most consequential election of our life time" or words to that effect. I was never convinced that was true until this year. The American corporate media have never been known for rigid devotion to the full truth and political neutrality but they seldom engaged in such sustained blatantly and overtly dishonest reporting as followed the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

The media's usual modus operandi was to manipulate people through omission, de-emphasis, and spin. For example, in 2011, Barack Obama became the first known US president to order the assassination of an American citizen "without due process of law". In actuality, the Obama administration fought successfully in court to ensure there would be no due process for US citizens on its "kill list".

These facts should have been blared relentlessly in headlines along with critical op-eds until Obama was successfully impeached. To be sure, there was media coverage of these outrages but nothing commensurate with the gravity of the offenses or even approaching the outrage ginned up by the media's blatantly false characterization of Trump's 2017 remarks regarding violent protests in Charlottesville. To this day, most Americans I speak with about it have little or no idea about Obama's assassination of American citizens not to mention his unapologetic killings of thousands of non-citizens, including hundreds of children.

However, this year's election was the culmination of four years of an unprecedented, near-complete decoupling from truth except when it supported the narrative. In some ways this started with Black Lives Matter and was fanned by Obama but it increased by orders of magnitude when Trump was elected. Since then we've been subjected to an emotionally and ideologically driven outpouring of hate and, often, blatant lies.

In all my life, I've never seen the mainstream media, academia, and the entertainment industry join in such sustained lockstep to villify and remove an American president and to demonize the people who put him in office. There's no conclusive evidence this will end when Trump is gone.

The naked, unrestrained quest for power and domination by any means of the Democrats and their allies is frightening. Few useful lies are too incredible to report and few inconvenient truths are so important that they can't be denied, misrepresented, or ignored. Unfortunately, many Americans uncritically rely on the mainstream media and are too busy, too lazy, or too indoctrinated to thoughtfully question what they are told, let alone what they are not told or allowed to view, hear, and judge for themselves.

A case in point is today's press conference with RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, Trump campaign adviser Kayleigh McEnany, and campaign General Counsel Matt Morgan. These three spoke for over 20 minutes on concerns about the election practices in some states and the lawsuits filed to deal with them.

McDaniel said, from Michigan alone, the campaign had 131 affidavits and over 2,800 incident reports concerning election irregularities. McEnany alleged that 682,479 ballots were counted in Allegheny County—where ~~Philadelphia~~ Pittsburgh is located—where no Republican poll watchers were permitted to observe the canvassing.

I'm not going to go through all the claims put forth, you can watch the press conference and make up your own mind. However, McDaniel was correct when she stated: "If the shoe were on the other foot. If it were this close the other way. If president Trump was in the lead in all these states ... the media would be screaming, 'This isn't over, the race isn't over, we need more time to count and make sure it's right.' But because it's Biden and a very slight lead the media demands the race is over and there's nothing to see here."

And, in fact, there has been a virtual corporate media blackout of the press conference today. Fox News started to show it and then quickly decided to censor it. The Washington Post covered the Fox News censorship but not the substance of the press conference. On their flagship afternoon news program National Public Radio has a nearly two-minute long segment the Bidens' dogs' new Twitter account but nothing about the allegations raised in the press conference. In fact, NPR apparently hasn't covered anything White House Press Secretary McEnany has said since Oct. 28.

If you truly care about technically free and fair elections in an admittedly flawed political system the time is now to step up against the Democrats and the media's potential, if unlikely, coup-in-the-making. Do it for your country and yourself, do it out of respect for the ideals of freedom of information and representative democracy. Tell your friends and family what is happening. Tell your political representatives that you want all credible allegations of electoral error and impropriety fully and transparently investigated.