\tWhat, I'd like to know, was the Democratic Party, which has demonstrated an uncanny ability to lose elections it should be able to win handily here in America, doing spending $40 million in U.S. taxpayers' dollars \"helping\" people and organizations in other countries to compete in elections to overturn incumbent governments overseas?\r\n
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\tIt turns out that even as it was blowing the presidential election in the U.S., an arm of the Democratic Party, the so called National Democratic Institute, was busy over the last year spending tens of millions of dollars prov ided by the State Department to help the opposition in the Ukraine to challenge the government party in that former Soviet state. (A similar Republican Party organization, the Republican International Institute, was doing the same thing with more State Department money. ) Some of that help was itself of questionable legality, which is why it was all done covertly.\r\n
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\tDoes anyone else see the huge irony and hypocrisy here? I mean, first of all, imagine for a moment the scandal that would ensue if it were to come out that a political party from a foreign country, say the British Labour Party or the Taiwanese Democratic Progressive Party, had secretly given $20 million to the Republicans or the Democrats during the last campaign!\r\n
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\tOn top of that, consider that the opposition party in the U.S. was actually working hand-in-glove with the government (and with the Republican Party!) in a subversive foreign policy effort of the Bush administration even as its chosen presidential candidate and nominal party leader, John Kerry, was campaigning against the foreign policy and foreign policy establishment of the Bush administration as inept and untrustworthy.\r\n
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\t It takes nothing away from the students and workers of the Ukraine who took to the streets and overturned the results of a corrupt election to say that citizens in America--and especially people who call themselves members of the Democratic Party--should be outraged that they and their party, the victims of fraud and voter abuse at home, were engaged in some of the same kinds of subterfuges overseas that GOP operatives and Republican-led election bureaucracies were using against them here at home. We should be demanding the heads of the entire leadership of the Democratic Party for participating in this outrage!\r\n
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\tBad enough that the U.S. government is interfering with foreign countries' elections. But our political parties have no business getting involved in this way in foreign affairs. In fact, the U.S. Constitution itself strictly forbids this, declaring all international relations matters to be the sole responsibility of the federal government.\r\n
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\tAmerica's already tattered reputation as a democratic model is cheapened and destroyed if it furtively tries to undermine elections in other nations. While there was clear evidence of corruption and fraud in the Ukrainian election, the improprieties were not limited to the ruling party and the states it controlled, and American outrage and condemnation of the results will not be taken seriously either in the Ukraine or in other newly democratic nations, given America's own role in bankrolling the opposition.\t\r\n
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For the rest of this column, please go (at no charge) to This Can't Be Happening! .\r\n
\r\n<\/p>\n","contact":"dlindorff@yahoo.com","link":"http:\/\/www.thiscantbehappening.net","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/html","summary":"While the pro-corporate leadership of the Democratic Party was busy blowing the US presidential election, they were taking millions from the State Department to join the Republican Party in helping to undermine the government of the Ukraine and\u2014presumably\u2014offering their demonstrab ly inept campaign expertise to Ukraine\u2019s democratic opposition.\r\n\r\n\r\n","numcomment":0,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/","filesize":null,"article_url":"\/news\/2004\/12\/120255.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[]}