DNC Meddling in the Ukraine Elections

 

What, 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?

It 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.

Does anyone else see the huge irony and hypocrisy here?

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.

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.

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!

Bad 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.

America’s 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.

Indeed, disclosure of the U.S. government’s large-scale covert backing of the opposition, more than anything else, could even lead to increased support for the governing party and end up costing the opposition victory in the Dec. 26 rematch, if the vote is close.

Meanwhile, we are left to wonder why the Democrats, so skilled at helping to organize mass demonstrations against election theft in the Ukraine, have proved so submissive and nonconfrontational in the face of election theft in places like Florida and Ohio.

December 11 / 12, 2004

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DAVE LINDORFF

CounterPunch contributor DAVE LINDORFF is a producer along with MARK MITTEN on a forthcoming feature-length documentary film on the life of Ted Hall and his wife of 51 years, Joan Hall. A Participant Film, “A Compassionate Spy” is directed by STEVE JAMES and will be released in theaters this coming summer. Lindorff has finished a book on Ted Hall titled “A Spy for No Country,” to be published this Fall by Prometheus Press.