It's a late Christmas present for the people of Ukrania, and a coal in
the stocking of democracy haters everywere.

Want to talk about stolen elections? [link|http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/11/28/wukra28.xml|This is what an attempt to steal an election looks like].

Excerpt:

It was 5.30pm on election day in Ukraine when the thugs in masks
arrived armed with rubber truncheons.

Vitaly Kizima, an election monitor at Zhovtneve in Ukraine's Sumy region,
watched in horror as 30 men in tracksuits stormed into the village
polling station.

"They started to beat voters and election officials, trying to push
through towards the ballot boxes," he told The Telegraph.

"People's faces were cut from blows to the head. There was blood all
over."

The thugs - believed to be loyal to the pro-Russian presidential
candidate Viktor Yanukovich from his stronghold, Donetsk - were repulsed
only when locals pushed them back and a policeman fired warning shots.

I say:

So it began. All indications are that Putin was behind it all. It
seems he's decided Russia needs its empire back in order to function.
Easier than re-inventing a dysfunctional society. He and his supporters
are as much dead-enders as those terrorists in the Sunni Triangle.
Nobody's likely to get his empire back on Dubya's watch.

Somebody poisoned Yushchenko, the opposition candidate, with dioxin,
disfiguring him. It didn't even slow him down.

Then the Ukranian courts declared the election invalid (which it all too
obviously was) and now we've got a new election.

[link|http://sg.news.yahoo.com/041227/1/3phyj.html|And Yushchenko has won.]

I don't know a lot about this guy, but he can't be worse than a puppet
of the Russian nomenklatura. Rumors are that billionaire investment
swindler and megalomaniac George Soros supported Yushchenko, but I won't
hold a mere rumored association against him.

Despite my very slight misgivings, I'm going to chalk this one up as a
victory for democracy, and another in a string of defeats for the anti-
democratic forces. This winning streak includes the elections in
Afghanistan, which were a victory simply by happening at all, the
elections in Australia, where pro-democratic forces prevailed, the
elections last November in the United States, where again pro-democratic
forces prevailed, and now Ukrania. The elitist Left have been beside
themselves since the American people refused to obey them. All they can
think to do is complain about how stupid we are. Well, we think they're
dumber than dirt too, but we don't whine about it. If only all our
enemies could be so inept.

Next up: Iraq. The terrorists are doing everything they can to prevent
democracy there, killing election workers and anyone else they can kill,
any way they can. This sort of thing won't win them any friends, but it
will separate the men from the weasels.

A much bigger concern is the administration's insistence on thinking of
Iraq as a legitimate nation state that must be kept together as a
political unit for some obscure reason. Dubya keeps speaking of "the
Iraqi People" as if there is such a thing. There isn't. There are at
least three distinct peoples in this arbitrary collection of real estate
we have named Iraq: the Kurds, the Shia Arabs, and those complete and
utter a**holes in the Sunni Triangle. These groups all hate each other,
and there's nothing to gain by trying to force them to get along.

But maybe it will work anyway. Time will tell. It certainly can't be
worse than when the Tikritis ruled.

On the whole, the trend is much more favorable to freedom than when that
gladhandler Clinton was cluttering up the Oval Office. We've already
undone a big chunk of the damage that was done while he was supposed to
be on watch.

[link|http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/politics.world.html#20041227|Angelfire link] (turn off Javascript to avoid popups)

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