Yeah, We Did It

I guess Carter wasn't available, so this one will go to the little "D" democrats - I mean the CIA. US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev. Forget that we're still sorting out the minor details of our own national election, obviously we can get anyone else elected anywhere in the world we want with the right PR and poling.

But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

Comments

[Chuck]

Let's see. This is the same Guardian that blatantly tried to interfere in the US 2004 presidential election by sending e-mails to fence-sitting voters in Ohio. Of course, this campaign was part of a covert voter fraud effort engineered by the Democratic Party's own true-blue, neo-stalinists in moveon.org and ACT.

Being of Ukrainian background myself, I suggest that Mr. Traynor take a few days and sober up from drinking too many Scotch and Sodas before he writes again on this sensitive subject. I would just love to see him confront a Ukrainian colleague of mine who drove 400 miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco (to the Ukrainian Consulate) to vote for Yuschenko and support those wearing orange. Why do I get that weird feeling that I won't need a Ukrainian-to-English dictionary to understand my colleagues response?

Let the Ukrainian people speak for themselves!