Friday, 7 February 2020

How Can America Play Kingmaker in Venezuela When It Can’t Be Trusted to Conduct a Caucus in Iowa?

Robert Bridge
  February 7, 2020
 
Just one day after the Iowa caucuses had descended into unbridled mayhem with the Democratic Party failing at simple arithmetic, Washington’s man in Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, was feted at Trump’s State of the Union Address as the rightful leader of the South American country. These dual events are symptomatic of a murderous empire drunk on hubris and arrogance, teetering on the edge of self-annihilation.

This implosion will probably puzzle many people because, as the Commander-in-Chief Donald J. Trump reminded throughout his SOTU address, times are good – indeed, as they so often are before an epic crash.
Just below the surface of the scorching U.S. economy, however, lies a bubbling volcanic lake of political passions – personified by Nancy Pelosi’s unhinged behavior at the SOTU that was so outrageous it needs no further comment – will eventually blow its lid, freeze-drying the nation in its treacherous tracks like a modern day Pompeii.
In the week that foretold of impending disaster, the establishment suffered two major setbacks, first by failing to drive out the swamp killer, Donald Trump, and second by failing to name, in transparent and time-honored fashion, the winner of the Iowa state caucus. These tandem events are connected since there is no way the ‘deep state’ would have accepted two major defeats at the same time. Thus it was forced to derail an enemy potentially more dangerous to the Democratic Party than Donald Trump, and that is the ‘democratic socialist’ Bernie Sanders.
Here is where America’s democratic mask slipped, revealing the true nature of the beast. As the results from the Iowa caucus were being tallied live, Mayor Pete Buttigieg enjoyed an early lead. Eventually, however, the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders started to close the gap before surging ahead of the pack. It was at this precise moment that the results fizzled out, purportedly due to a bad app. Not until the next day were the results made public as Buttigieg was declared the narrow victor, although the small-town mayor had been boasting that he had won the contest before any results were posted. Now to many observers, it looked as though the Democratic Party, sensing the winds of political change in the air, took their ball and stormed home in the middle of the game. Sound familiar?
At this point, a person could either choose to buy the story that a new app for reporting the results simply went kaput, or they could register as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ by arguing that the dirty Democrats rigged the game when it became apparent that Sanders was heading for victory. There are many reasons for supporting the latter theory, namely because the Democrats had conspired against Sanders before, as WikiLeaks revealed in 2016 with the release of some 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails.
And then there is the company behind the app, happily named Shadow Inc, which has a very shadowy lineage indeed. First off, Buttigieg, who certainly profited politically from Shadow’s inconceivable incompetence, or expertise, depending on how you look at it, had paid the company tens of thousands of dollars ahead of the Iowa caucus. Second, many of the top executives at Shadow worked in the past for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, no small footnote considering that particular campaign’s notorious commitment to ‘fair play.’ Third, efforts by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to “vet” the Shadow app were rejected out of hand by the Iowa Democratic Party. Now with all of the talk over the past several years about ‘Russian meddling’ in the U.S. elections, wouldn’t allowing the DHS a peek at the new technology seem like the smart thing to do? Maybe Iowans, like so many other Democrats, never really believed the Russian “nothing burger” after all.
Finally, to round out the high creep factor, none other than George Soros, the global master of disaster himself, was the top investor in the dark company. Assuming Soros may have wanted some kickback for his investment, who better to see through his deranged global dream to fruition? The socialist stalwart Bernie Sanders, with his army of radical left-wing progressives, better known as the ‘Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse,’ or the malleable mayor from South Bend, Indiana? However, given that Buttigieg would likely to be eaten alive by Trump in any debate, the Buttigieg ‘victory’ in Iowa was probably just a pawn move in a far more complex game that will soon involve billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who will soon appear on the CNN debate stage together with Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer since the media mogul managed to have the rules of the game changed.
Meanwhile, Tulsi Gabbard, the Iraqi War veteran who is higher in the polls than Klobuchar, Yang and Steyer, got no invitation to the debates leading up to the New Hampshire primaries.
From south of the border, the people of Venezuela must really be enjoying this American tutorial of democracy in action. In 2018, the United States declared the 2018 Venezuelan presidential elections, which saw Nicolas Maduro win reelection with 67 percent of the vote, “a sham.” It then moved to recognize Juan Guaido, previously a political stranger, the president of the South American country.
The arrogance of that meddling in Venezuela’s elections is greatly magnified when it is realized that the socialist country has some of the most transparent election technology in the world.
“Voters use a touch-sensitive electronic pad to make and confirm their choices,” wrote Eugenio Martinez in Forbes. “After confirmation, the electronic vote is encrypted and randomly stored in the machine’s memories. Voters audit their own vote by reviewing a printed receipt that they then place into a physical ballot box.”
In other words, chances of cheating in the Venezuelan elections, while not impossible, are exceedingly difficult. Americans, on the other hand, expect to get a receipt every time they buy a Big Mac at McDonald’s or a coffee at Starbucks yet receive zero ‘proof of purchase’ that they cast a vote in their increasingly shady elections. 
Thus, the comic timing of Guaido’s appearing as the poster boy for democracy at the SOTU, just one day after the Iowan debacle, was truly a spectacle far more revealing than Pelosi’s temper tantrum.

posted by Satish Sharma at 18:17

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