Action Alert!!!

Banana Republicans!

A history professor from Uppsala
University in Sweden, called a friend
to tell him about an article she had
read in which a Zimbabwe politician was
quoted as saying that children should
study this event closely for it shows
that election fraud is not only a
phenomenon of the developing world. (and
where do you think they learned it??!!)

1. Imagine that we read of an election
occurring anywhere in the third world in
which the self-declared winner was the son
of the former prime minister and that former
prime minister was himself the former
head of that nation's secret police (CIA).

2. Imagine that the self-declared winner
lost the popular vote but won based on some
old colonial holdover (electoral college)
from the nation's pre-democracy past.

3. Imagine that the self-declared winner's
victory' turned on disputed votes cast in a
province governed by his brother!

4. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots
of one district, a district heavily favoring
the self-declared winner's opponent, led
thousands of voters to vote for the wrong
candidate.

5. Imagine that that members of that nation's
most despised caste, fearing for their lives
and livelihoods, turned out in record numbers
to vote in near-universal opposition to the
self-declared winner's candidacy.

6. Imagine that hundreds of members of that
most-despised caste were intercepted on their
way to the polls by state police operating
under the authority of the self-declared
winner's brother.

7. Imagine that six million people voted in
the disputed province and that the self-
declared winner's 'lead' was only 327 votes.
Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting
machines' margin of error.

8. Imagine that the self-declared winner and
his political party opposed a more careful
by-hand inspection and re-counting of the
ballots in the disputed province or in its
most hotly disputed district.

9. Imagine that the self-declared winner,
himself a governor of a major province, had the
worst human rights record of any province in his
nation and actually led the nation in executions.

10. Imagine that a major campaign promise of the
self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded
human rights violators to lifetime positions on
the high court of that nation.

None of us would deem such an election to be
representative of anything other than the self-
declared winner's will-to-power. All of us, I
imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking
that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre-or anti-
democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere.