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

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."

Sunday, December 06, 2020

Anointing Biden & Election Irregularity Allegations III

Who said it?: "Even assuming there's nothing nefarious about the national election why has the cascade of irregularities around this country occurred virtually in a news blackout?"

If you guessed Tucker Carlson or some other right-wing crank then you are mistaken. It was MSNBC's Keith Olbermann talking with Newsweek senior editor and columnist Jonathan Alter days after the 2004 presidential election. Back then, Media Matters for America was complaining:

Media conservatives have labeled MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann a "voice of paranoia" and accused him of perpetuating "idiotic conspiracy theories" for his sustained spotlight on the numerous local news reports of voting irregularities during the November 2 presidential election. Olbermann's emphasis during Countdown with Keith Olbermann on voting irregularities has been part of a critique of what he has called the "Rube Goldberg voting process of ours" -- as well as a criticism of the major media outlets' failure to report on the irregularities.

So, in 2020, is Media Matters still complaining now that the shoe is on the other foot and the mainstream, pro-Democrat corporate media is engaged in a full court press to ignore, deny, and dismiss alleged irregularities in the 2020 presidential election and to denigrate anyone who makes or reports the allegations?

Why, yes, they are complaining ... about "Donald Trump's attempts to steal and thwart the election" and they are cataloging "right-wing media figures who have supported Trump's efforts to spread false claims and conspiracy theories about the election". In short, they have hypocritically done a complete about-face.

You see, it was not so long ago that some Democrats and other left-of-center folks took allegations of electoral irregularities and concern about voting machines very seriously or at least put on a good show of it. Election integrity activists produced an Emmy-nominated 2006 documentary, Hacking Democracy, and started groups such as VoteTrustUSA, VotersUnite, and Black Box Voting (all now moribund). Now that Biden has presumptively won the 2020 election such talk, from Democrats and their media lackeys, at least, is verboten.

Back in the day it was Diebold that lefties were mainly concerned about. Diebold, renamed as Premier Election Solutions, was sold to Dominion Voting Systems in 2010. That same year Dominion also bought assets of Sequoia Voting Systems.

In 2010, Project Censored published "Election 2008: Vanishing Votes, Disappearing Democracy And Media Misdirection" by Brad Friedman. Friedman, who is anti-Trump and now sees no evidence of voting irregularities wrote:

There was, of course, reason for everyone to be concerned, particularly about voting machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems, Inc. The company had been on the verge of bankruptcy and hostile takeover all year, and—though they had told federal investigators that they had divested from Smartmatic, their Venezuelan-owned, Hugo Chavez-tied parent company, in late 2006, after a hue and cry from Republicans—all of their systems’ Intellectual Property rights had secretly remained under the ownership of the Venezuelan firm.

The Venezuelan connection has, of course, recently been echoed by Sidney Powell along with allegations about Dominion. Though the Project Censored crowd seems uninterested in her allegations.

Also, in 2010, Project Censored published a revision of a 2006 piece by Dennis Loo titled: "No Paper Trail Left Behind: the Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election". Loo writes:

Welcome to a world where statistical probability and normal arithmetic no longer apply! The Democrats, rather than vigorously pursuing these patently obvious signs of election fraud in 2004, have nearly all decided that being gracious losers is better than being winners, probably because – and this may be the most important reason for the Democrats' relative silence – a full-scale uncovering of the fraud runs the risk of mobilizing and unleashing popular forces that the Democrats find just as threatening as the GOP does.

On November 8, I wrote: "I doubt that Trump's campaign will be able to muster evidence of election irregularities substantial enough to overturn the presumptive Biden victory. I am inclined to believe that he actually lost the election due to his unpopularity, not error or fraud." I still believe that but more strongly than ever I also believe there probably were significant election irregularities.

It seems the reason we are told over and over again that Biden is the "president-elect" and allegations of election problems are "baseless" is precisely because the mainstream strongly suspects or knows the allegations are not baseless at all. I also believe that the undisciplined and incompetent Team Trump is likely not up to the task of getting to the truth and, in any case, they have Democrats, the media, establishment Republicans, and the Deep State working against them.