[June 17, 2006: There is an update at the end of this entry.]
Lou Dobbs, whom I respect half the time, finally reported on the highly suspect "irregularities" of one of the voting-machine companies, in this case, Sequoia. He mentioned the "problems" experienced by voters in Illinois who recently used Sequoia machines in the primaries.
I thought Lou's report was probably too good to be true, and it was. He immediately blamed all of the company's shady problems on the fact that they are now owned by a Venezuelan company. It's mighty convenient for Lou that Venezuela is ruled by that "horrible" socialist and "public enemy" No. 3 or 4 or 5, Hugo Chavez (who is no more a threat to us than Castro has been since November 1962 -- after the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended --, only Hugo has that highly addictive magic elixir, OIL, which makes the ultra rich take all leave of their senses, their ethics, their common sense, etc., at the mere mention of its name).
Yep, Lou found a foreign scapegoat to take the implied blame for "all" of America's voting "irregularities." Never mind the fact that those irregularities were almost certainly engineered by the Americans who owned the company long before the Venezuelans had even heard of it. It's also mighty convenient that Lou found this foreign scapegoat just in time to counter Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Rolling Stone article.
Yes, Lou, it's totally OK to ignore the far more serious and thoroughly proven criminal behavior of such one-hundred-percent American-owned companies as Diebold and ES&S.
Lou condemns American corporations, such as Big Oil, all the time, but he refuses to condemn the voting-machine companies. Why?
I think the answer is simple: Big Oil cannot hide its criminal behavior from the American people. We are victims of it every time we pull up to a gas pump. The Mainstream media cannot hide this truth from us. The criminal behavior of voting-machine companies, on the other hand, is supposed to be a secret. We are not supposed to know that we are being screwed every time we use one of their machines; therefore, the mainstream media is duty bound to continue to hide those horrible secrets at all costs -- unless there just happens to be a foreign "enemy" to use as a convenient scapegoat. The mainstream media probably wouldn't even have reported this fact if it hadn't found it necessary to conduct damage control in the wake of Kennedy's article.
Yes, I am just speculating, but the timing is amazing. It has been public knowledge for a while that a Venezuelan company owns Sequoia. Why did Dobbs wait until now a day or two after Kennedy's article, to attack them?
[Update: June 17, 2006: Dobbs' report on the Venezuelan ownership of Sequoia was just the first in a seven-part series on hackable voting machines in this country. He spoke about the Venezuelans again in his next report, but, from what I've been able to gather, he spoke almost entirely about the U.S.-owned voting-machine companies in the remaining five segments of the series. On the second night, I wrote the following over at Bradblog: Wildly wishful thinking: Maybe [Kitty Pilgrim and Dobbs (or at least Pilgrim alone) are ever so carefully -- deviously -- working their way around CNN's neocon censors. Maybe their report on foreign (or at least Venezuelan) ownership of a voting-maching company is merely the trojan-horse method of talking about the electronic-voting scandal in this country.
Yes, as I say, that is wildly wishful thinking. The skeptic, the optimist and the realist in me are equally powerful (or weak), and every day, all day long, they battle it out with one another like the Three Stooges during Happy Hour.]
