EDITORIAL
The Lying Bastards at Voice of Russia
Even by the appalling standards of neo-Soviet pseudo-journalism, the lapdog cretins at the Voice of Russia radio propaganda network operated by the Putin Kremlin deserve some special kind of prize.
The willingness of these mendacious bastards to lie openly, shamelessly and repeatedly, regardless of how obvious it may be that they are doing so, bespeaks mental illness. They are so utterly removed from any vague sense of reality or ethics that it is possible to believe they have not yet heard about the failure and collapse of the USSR.
Here is the report on last week’s regional “elections” by Voice of Russia, for instance:
Local elections in Russia on Sunday went smoothly and saw a high turnout. As expected, the leading positions belong to United Russia. Few, if any, irregularities were reported during the polls. Had there been any vote-rigging on a large scale, the telephone lines would explode. Election commissions reported irregularities but on a small scale, which is normal. One of the villages reported a funny incident in which an accordion player called at the polling station early in the morning and began to play and dance. Apparently, he saw the elections as a special occasion.
Do not think, by any means, that VOR is off the reservation, dear reader. In fact, they are simply faithfully repeating the propaganda line of the Russian government. Thus: “The fact that United Russia’s results in each region were significantly higher than in the last elections means we’ve done everything right in the last four to five years,” said Parliamentary speaker Boris Gryzlov, one of United Russia’s leaders.
But as for the facts concerning this election, they are rather different and everybody in the free world knows it. Communist leader Gennady Zhyuganov proclaimed on TV that the election was “the dirtiest of all held in the post-Yeltsin period. The ruling party showed its worst features.” VOR chose not to report the comments of the chief of Russia’s #2 party. This from the leader of Russia’s #3 party: “Everything was there: bribery, blackmail and threats.” So sayeth Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Even the Kremlin admitted that seventeen — seventeen — criminal cases had been opened in connection with the voting.
Here is the Moscow News report, by way of contrast:
United Russia are the only ones celebrating after Sunday’s regional elections were branded some of the dirtiest ever. The ruling party romped to its customary triumphs in six regions but observers were crying foul and slamming “monstrous violations”. Moskovsky Komsomolets sent a reporter to work as an election observer in the Siberian capital and reported a man trying to stuff a thick bundle of ballot papers into a box. He was thwarted by police and a similar fate befell another over-enthusiastic United Russia supporter in Tatarstan, Kommersant reported. “United Russia knows its real rating, which is why it has staked everything on monstrous violations,” Oleg Mikheyev, who oversaw the campaign of A Just Russia in Novosibirsk, told the NY Times. “It can obtain the desired results only with the help of deception and forgery.” Observers say that this was a dirtier campaign than last March’s, and was almost on a par with the highly contentious regional elections in October 2009, which sparked fighting in the streets and numerous challenges in court, which were all quashed.
UPI added:
The elections, seen by analysts as a rehearsal before the 2011 parliamentary vote and the 2012 presidential election, were marred by a shooting death in Dagistan, the elections commission said. Officials said Abdulmuslim Nurmagomedov, head of the Khadzhalmakhi settlement, was fatally shot during a demonstration involving about 500 residents after 4,500 ballots were stolen, a regional police spokeswoman said.
The overwhelming victories by United Russia in every corner of the country despite the avalanche of bad economic news and the massive social problems that plague Russia is clear proof of massive vote fraud. Even in a nation burdened by draconian press controls and TV propaganda like Putin’s Russia, people are not totally oblivious of their fate. We have seen massive street protests across the country, and yet when votes are tabulated every genuine opposition party has been totally blocked from even the tiniest foothold in the corridors of power.
But none of this matters to the “journalists” at Voice of Russia. For them, the elections were paragons of virtue, free and fair in every respect, and merely served to confirm that, yes, Russia’s leaders are basically flawless champions of good who are leading Russia to ever higher levels of achievement and who therefore are adored by the population just as were Brezhenev and Stalin in their times.
Little wonder, then, that Russia is such a failure as a nation. Ignorant and dishonest, it can be nothing more.
La Russophobe 