In April 2022, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan was
ousted in a no-confidence vote engineered by his enemies. The U.S. was
suspected of meddling in Pakistani politics because Khan visited Moscow on the
very day of Russia’s Ukraine invasion. (We recently learned that the fat thumb of Washington was very much involved in tipping the scale.)
Then on August
3, Khan was jailed after conviction on the charge of “illegally selling state
gifts.” He was promptly rearrested by an anti-terrorism court on charges related to a May, 2023, riot in which his
supporters attacked an army office.
Khan remains extremely popular in Pakistan as an outsider to the two-family duopoly that has pretty much owned the country since its birth in 1947 in cahoots with its highly politicized military. Though temporarily freed, Khan is likely to be in and out of
detention and effectively blocked from contesting the next election despite his
tens of millions of backers. While Pakistan retains the outward shell of an
electoral democracy, there are few illusions about who rules the place.
Donald Trump, a former president, now faces 91 felony counts, which cumulatively could put him in prison for decades. The
charges range from the silly, like the felony of conspiring to pay off a hooker,
to the genuinely disturbing—trying to drum up a precise number of votes needed
to flip a close election and stay in power.
The U.S. is not Pakistan. But the end run to avoid allowing
the popular will to be heard is unsettlingly similar. In both cases, lawfare is
at work to jigger the results of the next election. This is true whether or not
Khan is guilty of keeping state swag and egging on his supporters to riot or whether
Trump is guilty of attempted vote-stealing.
The situation did not suddenly materialize out of nowhere. The
steady decline of what passes for democratic process did not originate with
Trump, despite the fervid beliefs of his anti-partisans. Amidst the deafening
clamor about electoral manipulation, one rarely hears the merest reference to
one indisputable fact: Our presidents are not elected by the majority of voters.
And no one seems to care.
The year 2000—not 2020—marked the modern wave of democratic
collapse. Not only did we witness the Supreme Court’s judicial coup handing
power to George W. Bush, but the Democrats, after the briefest of fussing, said,
Okay fine. They then embraced Bush as a legitimate president, absolved him for
9/11 (imagine the blame-howling if Gore had presided over that nightmare), and
saluted his decision to invade, conquer, and destroy a country halfway around
the world. War-making, not the detail of who was to preside over it, was the
overwhelming consensus. Defying the popular will didn’t matter.
But, many will argue, elections do matter, and the orange
guy tried to subvert it. He made up fake stories, declared the winner
illegitimate, and sent his minions to intimidate election officials and even Congress
itself. True, and perhaps punishment is in order.
And when will accountability arrive for those who claimed
the 2016 election was rigged, delegitimized him, then cooked up a phony link to
a foreign power using the full resources of the intelligence/security state and
slavish collusion by most media? The long-running Russiagate scandal was orders
of magnitude worse than Watergate, but that subversion of the electoral process
is still given a full pass. Take a moment to view Matt Orfalea’s mash-up video juxtaposing Trump’s inflammatory
statements about 2020 with Hillary’s and her minions’ claims about 2016. (Watch
it quickly as YouTube has flagged it again as a violation of its policy for “glorification,
recruitment, or graphic portrayal of dangerous organizations,” despite the
content consisting solely of video clips of public statements.)
The pursuit of Trump’s wacko election denialists is
selective prosecution, the definition of a rogue state no longer subject to the
rule of law. Trump did try to subvert the electoral process, but he wasn’t the
first to do so, only far clumsier at it. He is also unprotected by the uni-party war state, unlike Team Dem.
The U.S. is not only approaching Third World-levels of income and
wealth inequality but also the WWF approach to electoral showmanship we associated with it. For example, Senegal
has a sorta-kinda democracy with regularly scheduled elections, but its main
opposition figure, Ousmane Sonko, is now on hunger strike after being indicted
again, this time for “undermining state security, criminal association, and creating serious
political unrest.” That sounds a little more tinpot-dictator-ish than what’s
happening here, but not by much.
Sonko’s party was also dissolved, which so far hasn’t
happened to the Republicans. But if Democrats and their selected prosecutors
have their way, Donald Trump may have to resort to a hunger strike to prevent
state officials from blocking his name from the ballot based on an
interpretation of Article 3 of the Constitution that is getting quite a bit of
airtime.
Imran Khan can’t participate in Pakistani elections for 5
years, and if he’s still popular by then, no doubt new charges will appear to
make sure he doesn’t. Mr. Sonko might try to run for president of Senegal, but campaigning
from a prison cell will limit his chances. Once upon a time, we looked upon
these sham exercises as uncivilized and backward, worthy only of banana
republics. Now, we’re eager to join them.
The real winner of the last election and, in all likelihood,
the next is the MICIMATT*, the machine overseeing the churn of our national
wealth into the lucrative business of making war. Our polity resembles less a
republic than a Rome-ish state built on expeditionary legions and headed by a
figurehead emperor. There’s far too much money on the table to leave important decisions
in the hands of mere citizens of whatever partisan stripe. That will persist
until the propaganda-induced illusions of military prowess and supremacy
finally crumble and collapse. Stand by for news on that.
(*Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think
Tank Complex, h/t Ray McGovern, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity—VIPS)
