World Affairs Brief, January 11, 2008. Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.

Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief

ELECTION MANIPULATION IN FULL SWING

We live in a fractured society pitting a few million ideologically savvy people against a growing majority of ill-informed voters whose ideas are manipulated by the media. Almost all voters are dissatisfied with the status quo, but often for the wrong reasons. The majority keeps being lured away from limited government by the promise of greater federal health and education benefits as if that were the solution to galloping inflation. In fact, it is the problem-not the solution.

Predictably, they always vote for change, but change never comes. This is because we are rarely presented with a candidate who understands the totality of change necessary. When a candidate like Ron Paul emerges, who really understands the problems and proposes the inevitable tough solutions, he is labeled as a kook, or extremist,…but mostly ignored. About 2-5% of the nation is able to see through it all, but as we found out in the New Hampshire primary, it’s not enough to overtake the momentum of ignorance within the majority. The system is rigged for secrecy, and takes advantage of the average American’s dependence upon the half-truths and distortions we are fed by the establishment media, public education and conventional political theory. Thus, the typical voter holds an almost infinite variety of ignorant and irrational ideas about both cause and effect of our national crises and thus becomes easy prey to false solutions and media manipulation. We saw all these things play out in New Hampshire this week, including some last minute media manipulation and vote fraud–signs that the Powers That Be (PTB) are having to scramble to control this race.

If the establish media does its job right and if the power brokers have selected an electable candidate (with name recognition, charisma, and lack of principles sufficient to follow orders), the election is usually a done deal by the time the early primaries are finished. The anointed ones from each party are designated “front runners” before the primaries and that is usually enough to sway the voters of the first few primaries to ratify that view. Then the media declare the respective winners as “unstoppable” –having a “mandate from the people.”

This kind of manipulation is possible because, in the absence of accurate knowledge and solid reasoning, a significant amount of swing voters tend to follow whoever is perceived to be winning (within their general political proclivity–liberal or conservative). Only a small percentage of dedicated liberals on the Left and constitutional conservatives on the Right understand the actual criteria behind their choices and make decisions based upon that analysis. Only this small percentage of Americans are highly resistant to media bias. Mainstream, soft thinking liberals and conservatives are easily swayed to some extent because they don’t have a good concept of the details either in perception or analysis which would allow them to see contradictions in what is presented to them.

The proof of this sloppy perception and contradictory reasoning among voters was found in a detailed analysis of those who voted for John McCain this week. Incredibly, John “the surge” McCain got a large percentage of votes from those who oppose the war. McCain is the biggest supporter of the war in Iraq. Even more amazing, he got a majority of his votes from those who don’t like Bush, even though McCain is a solid supporter of President Bush. McCain even got thousands of votes from people who were against illegal immigration and President Bush’s amnesty proposals–which McCain has always supported. What were these people thinking? He also got a lot of votes from those who support abortion even though McCain claims to be pro-life. Perhaps, in this case, they correctly noted his support for life was only token support. In practice he always says he opposes the overturning of Roe vs. Wade.

If these voters had exercised even a pittance of rational analysis, they would have selected Ron Paul, the only candidate who is consistently pro-life, anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-NWO, anti-North American Union, and deficit spending and has the votes in Congress to prove that it’s not just rhetoric. Why then do they not vote for someone imminently qualified that matches their major positions on the issues?

I find it hard to believe they didn’t know of Ron Paul, even with the media blackout. Perhaps they were swayed by a combination of propaganda that “Ron Paul can’t win” (a kind of self-fulfilling media prophecy, when Paul is denied coverage), and a flurry of reactionary hate Romney sentiment–carefully portrayed as “got to vote for McCain.” Some of the independents voted for McCain because they still perceived him as the competitor of Bush as in the 2004 primary (which McCain won) which is bad thinking and equally bad perception. Even if they had only followed the establishment news this past year they would have seen that McCain was and still is in lock step with the Bush administration.

Lastly, many surely reacted positively to the swarm of newspaper endorsements for McCain that came out of nowhere in a strangely unanimous boost for McCain, and no one else–even as his campaign was moribund and dying. This was bandwagon politics creating an artificial surge, and it worked. The miraculous “comeback” of John McCain was pure manipulation. Naturally, funding to his campaign by major corporations has also “miraculously” come back out of nowhere to give McCain new millions to spend for promotion.

The establishment push for Huckabee in Iowa was done strictly to defeat Romney–not because they like this evangelical populist (even though he did do everything his liberal advisors induced him to do as governor of Arkansas). Huckabee is not electable nationwide and will soon be discarded by the promoters.

What is also hypocritical (but not unexpected), is that the media has NOT picked up on the “Swift Boat” type of attacks on McCain that are swarming the internet. The media is obviously protecting McCain’s phony “war hero” reputation from the attacks of his fellow veterans and POWs who charge McCain with collaborating with the enemy in prison and refusing to support the breaking of our own government’s veil of secrecy surrounding America’s abandonment of the POW/MIAs in Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War. In the 2004 election, Vietnam Swift Boat veterans attacked John Kerry’s claims to heroism in that war, with devastating effect–thanks to the Media making it a huge issue. In contrary manner, they are choosing not to give a voice to McCain’s detractors. The media promoted the attack on Kerry in 2004 because the establishment had ordained Bush to win and needed to undermine the appeal of Kerry.

While McCain is being positioned as the new front runner, don’t count Rudy Giuliani out just yet. This former Time “Man of the Year” (for being complicit in the 9/11 cover-up) is still the one they want–despite the growing public knowledge about his links to corruption. McCain is being pushed forward (for now) as insurance in case Giuliani is not able to pull out a major victory in Florida and/or Super Tuesday. If Giuliani fails to win in those primaries, he will not survive the cut. They want McCain to inherit front runner status rather than Romney.

For some reason the establishment is dead set against Romney, even though Romney has surrounded himself with conventional Republican political hacks and even one very bad globalist “security” advisor (Coffer Black of Blackwater fame). But he isn’t the only one. Here is the listing of all the globalist advisors controlling each of the mainstream candidates’ campaigns, courtesy of the Washington Post. Negative commentary added is mine.

John McCain: Henry Kissinger; Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state, covert CIA drug pipeline manager and Bush family ally; Robert McFarlane, Reagan/Bush national security adviser, Iran-Contra scandal; William Kristol, arch neocon editor of The Weekly Standard; Alexander Haig, Reagan/Bush secretary of state; George Shultz, Reagan/Bush secretary of state, Hoover Institution, Bechtel exec., “kingmaker” responsible for the vetting of George W. Bush prior to recommending him to the establishment for president; Brent Scowcroft, Kissinger associate and national security advisor to Presidents Ford and George H.W. Bush; James Woolsey, former CIA director; Lawrence Eagleburger, Sec. of State under Bush 41; William Ball, diplomat and Reagan administration Sec. of Navy; Colin Powell, Sec of State under Bush and Army officer who helped cover up the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam.

Barack Obama: Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security advisor and handler of Pres. Carter; Anthony Lake, Clinton administration national security adviser and president’s handler; Sarah Sewall, Clinton administration deputy secretary of defense, counter-insurgency czar; Richard Clarke, Clinton and Bush administration counter-terrorism expert; Susan Rice, Clinton administration Africa specialist and NSC member of globalist Brookings Institution; Bruce Riedel, former CIA officer, NSC Near East and Asian affairs at Brookings.

Hillary Clinton: Bill Clinton; Madeline Albright, Clinton administration secretary of state responsible for the globalist intervention in the Balkans; Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security adviser and handler; Richard Holbrooke, UN ambassador; Gen. Wesley Clark, handled the attack on Serbia/Kosovo; Leslie Gelb, arch globalist on the Council on Foreign Relations, former State and Defense Department official; Martin Indyk, Clinton administration Israel ambassador, Brookings Inst.; Strobe Talbott, second Clinton handler, and Deputy Sec. of State, creator of Caspian oil group, Brookings Inst.; Jeffrey Smith, former CIA general counsel.

Rudy Giuliani: Kim Holmes, former George W. Bush assistant secretary of state; Louis Freeh, former FBI director; Stephen Yates, former deputy assistant to Dick Cheney; Norman Podhoretz, neocon leader at Hudson Institute; Kenneth Weinstein, also of Hudson Inst.; various other neocon advisors from the globalist Hoover Institution and other neo-con institutions too numerous to list.

Mike Huckabee: Huckabee has not been forthcoming about his advisors, but what the Post reveals is quite enough: Ed Rollins, Republican political operative sent in to salvage Huckabee’s campaign just prior to the national media boost; Frank Gaffney, neocon at CFR and Center for Security Policy;

John Edwards: Barry Blechman, Jimmy Carter assistant director of US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, founder and chairman of the Henry L. Stimson Center; Irving Blickstein, former assistant deputy chief of Naval operations, RAND Corporation (reportedly a CIA front);

Mitt Romney: Coffer Black, former CIA and George W. Bush state department counter-terrorism officer, vice president of Blackwater USA; Alberto Cardenas, lobbyist and former chairman of Florida Republican party; Roger Noriega, George W. Bush assistant secretary for Western hemisphere affairs; Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R, Mich.), ranking member, House Intelligence Committee.”

You can tell by the depth of globalist advisors who is really in the establishment camp. Huckabee, Edwards and Romney have the fewest. McCain, Clinton and Giuliani have the most and the worst. Obama has the holdovers from the Carter administration-another indication that he may not be the globalists’ intended winner.

Because of his mainstream advisors, Romney’s positions are in general alignment with the Bush administration, so why isn’t he acceptable to the establishment. Certainly, they don’t care about his religion. Because Romney is not an insider like Giuliani and McCain, they fear that they would have another Reagan on their hands if he got the nomination–someone they would have to manipulate to work around his basic conservative values, as they did Reagan. Lest any of you still harbor the misconception that Reagan was a strong ideological conservative, let me set the record straight. Reagan did have basic conservative ideals, but he had a bad habit of compromising those ideals in order to get legislation passed in a Democratic controlled Congress. His record as Governor of California was one of many unwise compromises, which carried forward into his presidency. Still he wasn’t a conspiring globalist and so they had to work hard to control him. He was much more compliant after the assassination attempt by CIA patsy John Hinkley Jr.

Even though, like Reagan, Romney isn’t a knowing conspirator, he is trying so hard to gain the acceptance of the establishment, that his policies end up supporting globalist goals. That’s what happens to good men who choose to remain ignorant of conspiracy theories and facts. Romney is, however, much sharper intellectually than Reagan (who could rarely recognize when a speech given to a religious conservative audience on one night was in contradiction to another speech he would give the next day to a liberal audience). Romney is an “in charge” professional who can write his own speeches and is capable of taking a 180 degree turn if he sees something wrong. That’s what they fear, and it is obvious by the barrage of negative press and opinion Romney is getting from the pundits that the word is out to “kill Romney’s bid.” That’s not easy to do, however, given Romney’s wealth and ability to fund his own campaign.

I think the establishment strategy is to hit Romney hard enough with bad press in the early primaries to get him to quit the race before the convention. For example, the media keeps taking shots at Romney claiming, “people don’t trust him.” Well, a lot of people don’t trust McCain or Giuliani either, but the media doesn’t make an issue of that. It is obvious they are only targeting Romney, trying to counter his natural likeability. That’s also why the media keeps bringing up the anti-Mormon bias of the evangelical Christians, a sad commentary on our nation’s state of intolerance for other denominations’ sincerely held beliefs.

I think they also fear how Romney’s charisma might play in a major convention speech, and his ability to capitalize upon the widespread conservative distrust for Giuliani and McCain. They want him out of the way early so they can match up Giuliani or McCain against a weaker competitor like Mike Huckabee-who is also disliked by many conservatives for his populist/socialist ideas.

In media coverage leading up to the NH primary, they kept up a barrage of negative comments about Romney, and only about Romney (They simply avoided attacking Ron Paul even though the signs in the backdrop of CNN’s coverage were wall-to-wall “Ron Paul”). For example, when they showcased a Romney TV add the commentator said, “but, the public isn’t buying it.” Really? How does he know it is universally rejected? American opinion is all over the map. Implying that “everyone” is rejecting a well crafted message is a blatant pejorative. Various commentators mentioned numerous times how the “voters hate Romney.” Why only Romney? How about those that hate Giuliani, or hate McCain. Surely there are some of those too–but no mention. All of this is powerful evidence of prejudicial coverage, and falls right into line with the strange “anti-endorsement” of the leading NH liberal newspaper The Concord Monitor saying, “Romney must be stopped!” Why Romney more than McCain whose policies are similar? I mention all of this not because I’m a Romney fan, but because this is essential knowledge about how the PTB manipulate voters in these early primaries.

There was also a blatant example of Fox News censoring Ron Paul’s name as they posted a news story about the Wyoming caucus vote, written by the Associated Press. The AP story said, “Don’t forget Wyoming. It’s been overlooked in the hoopla surrounding Thursday’s Iowa caucuses and next week’s New Hampshire primary, but Wyoming Republicans will caucus Saturday and choose delegates to the national convention in September. Candidates have paid little attention to the state, though. Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Duncan Hunter and Ron Paul have passed through since September. Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain have not.” The Fox version is identical except for the missing name of Ron Paul. Shameful censorship!

It wasn’t enough that Fox News cut Ron Paul out of their televised debate, they had to make sure his name never appeared in even an obscure story. Romney won the Wyoming caucus, by the way, which also barely merited a mention in the mainstream news. The media seems determined to deny Paul any media coverage at all, rather than attack him as they do Romney. That’s because Paul’s ideas and platform are dangerous to the globalist agenda. Ron Paul alone squarely challenges the globalists–something Romney fails to do. It appears that the PTB want to make sure Ron Paul does not cross the 10% threshold in any primary, which would garner some dedicated delegates to the Republican convention. Here’s how the delegate process is manipulated.

DELEGATES: Romney’s second place finish actually nets him some delegates for the convention, just as Ron Paul earned a few in Iowa as well (4 out of 40). The counting of delegates is a murky and ever-changing process, also manipulated for political purposes. There are “soft” delegates (which don’t have to actually vote for who they represent) and “hard” delegates (who have no choice), so it’s really fluid. There is also a difference between Democrats and Republicans and Republicans allow different systems state to state. The Democrats do the fair thing by allotting delegates proportionally to each candidate’s votes. So Barack Obama come out of New Hampshire’s primary with the same amount as Hillary, because of rounding of the percentages for each. Her “win” was more a major publicity victory than a delegate win.

The Republicans still manipulate the process, state by state, some allocating all delegates to the majority winner (winner-take-all), and others allocate them proportionally like the Democrats. Republicans leaders in some states will often change the rules just before an election depending on how their favored candidate is doing. If he is going to win a majority, they change the system to “winner-take-all” so he takes control of all delegates. If less than a majority is projected, they may change the system to a proportional allocation of delegates so the ill-favored winner is denied some of the delegates. Here’s a current breakdown of each state’s Republican Primary and how delegates are apportioned: http://www.thegreenpapers.com/P08/R-DSVE.phtml

Half of New Hampshire’s delegates were stripped by the Republican National Committee for changing their primary date without consent. So McCain’s win will mean he gets only about 7 delegates. Ron Paul was denied any since his reported totals failed to reach the 10% threshold.

Newhouse News Service gives us some idea of Giuliani’s strategy in concentrating on bigger, more liberal states to begin his “comeback.” “As his Republican rivals focus on Iowa and New Hampshire, Rudy Giuliani is banking on states like New Jersey to boost him to victory in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Thanks to a rule change engineered by his supporters earlier this year [see what I mean?], all of New Jersey’s 52 GOP delegates will go to the statewide winner of its Feb. 5 primary. The same is true in New York, Connecticut and Delaware — all states where the former New York City mayor enjoys enormous popularity. Taken together, they could be the biggest prize of the biggest day in the primary season, and are critical to Giuliani’s national strategy. The four states account for 201 of the nearly 1,200 delegates needed to sew up the Republican nomination. Whatever you want to call it — Super Duper Tuesday, Tsunami Tuesday, Giga Tuesday — Feb. 5 will be a decisive day for both parties in choosing a nominee. For Republicans, 45 percent of the total delegates to the national convention in Minneapolis in September will be chosen. Nine of the 21 states holding GOP contests that day use a winner-take-all format and Giuliani has targeted each of them except Arizona, the home state of Sen. John McCain.”

“Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia professor and expert in presidential politics, said it’s a smart but risky strategy that depends entirely on Giuliani surviving six earlier contests, especially Florida the week before. ‘As long as Giuliani can stay afloat through January 29, he should do well on February 5 and beyond, emerging with the overall delegate lead,’ Sabato said. ‘That’s a big ‘if,’ though.'” Let’s hope so.

“The situation is a bit different on the Democratic side, where winner-take-all primaries are strictly against party rules. While New York Sen. Hillary Clinton has a tremendous lead in the polls, candidates can still hope to capture some New Jersey delegates by winning at least 15 percent of the vote in any of 20 delegate districts. That’s one reason Illinois Sen. Barack Obama is still competing here.”