Xymphora on the Iraq 'Election'

BushCo is nothing if not one of the most brilliant political prestidigitators in history. They are already alchemists of the first water, given the ways in which they can transmute death into lucre, blood into oil, and black into white.

But with every election in which they have any involvement — whether at home or abroad — they carelessly continue to master their legerdemain, making the most remarkable things appear out of nowhere. Their latest trick was pulling joyful "freedom" out of a hostile siege's dark ass, transforming a country occupied by criminal enemy forces into a democracy with a wave of a wand and a flash of ballot paper.

Using a sophisticated and practiced blend of misdirection, razzle dazzle, and smoke and mirrors — accompanied by a cadre of magician's assistants called "journalists" — they successfully convince the audience rubes people that the most ridiculous, transparently phony, farcical, penny-ante stage-managed show — called, without a hint of irony, an "election," — they convince people that these travesties, which are shameless mockeries of democracy, are actually the voice of the people freely choosing their governments. It makes baby Jesus weep, I tell you what.

You know, those fuckers are right — they do create their own reality, polishing their turds to look like gold, then selling them to rubes good folks who buy 'em (on credit, of course) while exclaiming "ooh" and "ahh" as they admire its shiny gleam.

Xymphora, in his ever on-target way, aptly summarizes the recent mockery in Iraq:

The real tragedy in all this is that it sets up Bush to continue to use his bogus equation of American warmongering with freedom. In other words, going along with the charade of this election means you are implicitly dooming the next victim of the American Empire, who will receive exactly the same treatment under the guise of the same phony phreedom. The next attack will be easier, as Bush can fall back on the example of the phreedom he has personally granted to the Iraqi people, and will no doubt promise the people of Iraq, or Syria, or Cuba, or Venezuela, or wherever. We will see the mechanics of this phony pharce of phreedom repeated again and again, with staged elections being used to retroactively justify the results of American colonialist violence.

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...this farce of an election proves nothing about Iraq, but a lot about the United States. It proves that by staging the form of an election, the Bush Administration is able to magically sanitize its most evil acts in the eyes of the American public and American public writers and commentators. The most tragic element of this election is that writers who call themselves moderates or progressives are now starting to write that this election validates the entire Bush world-view. Resistance is now futile, and there is officially no American opposition to the Bush warmongers. If such an obviously questionable election can make the worst war crimes right, Bush is out of control and the whole world is in great peril.