NOV 16 - 30, 2004

VOL. 2 ISSUE 22

NOVEMBER 23, 2004 – Heard about an election lately where abnormally high voting in some precincts has led to a victory preferred by the Bush administration but charges of fraud by impartial international observers?

Right, of course I am talking about the Ukraine.

Today tens of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets in protest.  Why?

As the Washington Post reports (see article: Ukraine Opposition Leader Claims Victory), “The commission's official results, with more than 99.48 percent of precincts counted, showed Yanukovych leading with 49.39 percent to Yushchenko's 46.71 percent. But several exit polls had found Yushchenko the winner.”

Yanukovych was the “pro-Western reformer” that the Bush administration wants to see win the election, Viktor Yushchenko the preferred candidate of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

In the Ukraine, the people are taking the situation a little more seriously than, say, in other places where similar things have happened recently.

“People gathered behind metal barriers around the parliament building holding a giant orange ribbon over their heads. They chanted "Criminals, go away!" and "Yushchenko!" Some waved signs reading, "Today or Never.” according to the Post.

And while the parliament is being called on by local Ukrainian governments not to recognize the results of the election, the man who celebrated President Bush's re-election by announcing he will deploy a new generation of nukes unlike any seen before, Putin, has already called to congratulate his candidate and shrugged off any claims of fraud – even before the official result is declared.

“Yanukovych, 54, has received strong support from President Vladimir Putin of Russia, whose spokesman issued a statement Monday from Brazil, congratulating Yanukovych on winning the presidency, although the result has not been declared,” states another Washington Post article ("Widespread Vote Fraud Is Alleged In Ukraine").

Which is nice, except a US Republican Senator named Richard Lugar has the opinion, shared by EU observers, that the elections was an outright fix.

As the Post reports, “Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, said in Kiev that there had been "a concerted and forceful program of election-day fraud and abuse." He called on Kuchma "to review all of this and take decisive action in the best interests of the country."

And just in case you weren’t ready to draw any parallels between this election and our recent presidential contest, a spokesman for the victorious Putin-picked candidate went ahead and did it for you.

“"These polls don't work," said Gennady Korzh, a spokesman for Yanukovych. "We will win by between 3 to 5 percent. And remember, if Americans believed exit polls, and not the actual count, John Kerry would be president."

A mouthful indeed.

Problems cited include excessively high voter turnout in Yankovych-leaning districts, on the order of 96% turnout in districts where only 65% turned out in the first round of voting; absentee ballot problems; and voter intimidation.

“At a news conference, the monitors said there were too many violations for them to enumerate,” reports the Post in the second article.

But, as luck would have it, all the errors seem to favor the Putin-backed guy, which, somehow, led to the result being entirely different from what the exit polls predicted, and an end result where the Putin guy eked it out by about 3 percent.

Sound familiar?  Almost as if Putin is calling Bush on something, as if he is saying, "I see what you did - you call me on this and I will call you on what you pulled off."

More directly, take a look at what Putin has done in just the couple of weeks since Bush's re-election:  stood up boastfully to brag about the new nukes he will have which will surpass our best, and then, in true Cold War fashion, in effect take back over one of the former Soviet states, the Ukraine, through a fraudulent election that amounts to a coup.

Add to this, as CNN reports today, that "Russia is now on the map of the global economy."  In particular, as one where, "concerns have increased about the health of its democracy and the state's role in its economy."

""Recent political developments suggest a concentration of power in the hands of the executive and a perceptible drift from the democratic practice that has raised concerns in the international community,'' according to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, as CNN reports.

We've been begging, pleading - and warning:  someone, anyone, pay attention to Russia please.

Unfortunately for America, the Bush administration is not only bogged down in an unnecessary war in Iraq, but eyeing a go with Iran.  All this while the record deficits continue to grow, and the world is growing weary of buying up our debt.

Hundreds of thousands are in the streets in the Ukraine because the exit polls not matching the vote totals showed that something was wrong with the elections.  They are rallied en masse because they see the former Soviet Union beginning to reemerge.

At least one journalist who is not on our staff is finally getting the point, as the Washington Post finally echoes the call we first made almost a year ago in today's editorial Coup In Kiev.  Not bad.  Only a year it took them.

How long will it take President Bush and his administration, or the Democrats, to stand up and deal with this, the biggest foreign problem truly facing our nation at the moment?  President Bush's naive and inept foreign policy not only has cost us our place in the world, cost over a thousand US lives, and made us millions of new enemies for life, but it is costing us the victory we fought for decades to win in the Cold War.

We now return you to the non-M/I media, where a dispute over a fight on a basketball court gets weeklong coverage, while a pending recount in a place called Ohio, a call from top researchers to figure out why Bush came out 130,000-260,000 votes ahead of where he should have in Florida, and a general massive problem with the vote count note equaling the exit polling are apparently not news at all.