and remember...don't steal the candy
Jesus H Christ. And I thought I was joking about an international organisation monitoring the American presidential elections , but obviously not. Link
It seems that after 12 Democratic House members wrote to Kofi Annan, to ask the UN to monitor the 2004 election after what they deemed to be a stolen 2000 election, President Bush appeared to bow to pressure, but with the exception of turning to the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) instead.
There has been outrage expressed by conservatives and, in particular, the America Policy Institute, with claims that this will be a blatant infringement on American political sovereignty (one American Policy Institute article has the screaming headline – “Foreign Observers to Treat America Like a Third World Delinquent”). This is tainted with no small amount of incredulity that Bush would sink to such lows to satiate the wheedling desires of a select few Democrats.
After reviewing what the American Policy Institute has to say about the OSCE, it wouldn’t surprise me that Bush would gladly call them in, if in fact he is the crooked stealer of elections he’s made out to be. Peruse at your pleasure:
So, how well does the OSCE do its job? Well, according to Representative Ron Paul (R-TX): “We should be wary about organizations like the OSCE that seek to involve themselves in our electoral process. The OSCE in particular has a terrible record in the newly democratic countries of central Europe, where it normally operates. According to groups that follow OSCE, this organization does much more to undermine free elections than to promote them.”
In Bosnia in 1996, Paul reports, the OSCE approved parliamentary elections despite the fact that an impossible 107 percent of the eligible voting-age population supposedly had voted. “This year,” Paul said, “the OSCE approved the election of Mikheil Saakashvili in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia with a Saddam Hussein-like 97 percent of the vote.”
Link
I mean if you were thinking of fixin’ up an election and people are suspicious and call on you to get independent monitoring, these would be the guys you would call. Hell, they would deliver the election for you on a silver platter.
Like I said, I thought this was all some sort of sick joke…but it’s NOT!
Things just keep on getting stranger and stranger.