POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
"... a managed
democracy is not a true democracy..."
May we set that down in the Globe Book of Golden Editorial
Bromides?
Even if true, it only puts Putin in the same category as
many American politicians.
There is widespread election fraud in every national
election in the U.S.
Several American presidents were indeed elected through vote
fraud: these include John Kennedy, George Bush, and Lyndon Johnson's rise to
the Senate.
I grew up in the Chicago of the 1950s and 1960s, and vote
fraud - everything from political supporters helping old folks work the new
voting machines and the registration of the names of the dead off cemetery
registrations to ward-heelers burning the midnight oil hitting the switches on
the then-new voting machines or voiding opposition ballots by making marks with
pencil lead stuck under their fingernails - was common, accepted fact - indeed,
there were many jokes about it.
Indeed, in our last election in Canada, Harper's goons began
importing shabby American practices with its robo-calls - vote fraud in every
sense of the term.
To expect Russia - with its absolutist history - to
instantly meet high democratic standards is just nonsense or propaganda.
Please, Globe editors, when you write stuff like this,
ignoring any sense of perspective in history and national affairs, you only
scream to your informed readers, and you do have some informed readers, that
your attitudes towards propaganda are just a little gentler than those of the
old Politburo.
Russia has made remarkable progress, and rough democracy or
not, most Russians wanted Putin.
That's more than you can say for former-President Bush.
