Before you can presume to teach… you must practise what you preach… I think that’s quite beyond people like Mr Gates, let alone buffoons like Limbaugh and Palin…
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Robert Gates, the former head of the CIA, presumed to present the world lessons in democracy…
Another name has entered into the ranks of the Solons of American democracy. Robert Gates, the present Secretary of Defence and the former head of such a bulwark of democracy as the Central Intelligence Agency, presumed to present the world lessons in democracy. In his view, he’s a great authority on the subject… after all, he established secret prisons so that CIA officers could torture detainees without judicial oversight. True, he has thus far avoided making public sermons or lessons on the subject, for that would put himself, and the democracy he’s touting into an awkward jam. For, much to his disappointment, his classified “secret” written instructions regarding other countries, including Russia, surfaced when the WikiLeaks site posted them on the Internet. At present, as he tried to teach lessons in democracy to others, the former chief of the US knights of cloak and dagger revealed lapses in his memory that are not acceptable in such a high-ranking government official. Before he joined the present administration, Mr Gates was a tireless foot soldier on George W Bush’s team, whose presidential legitimacy is under question by competent authorities.
George W Bush failed to poll the sufficient number of votes to win the election during the 2000 presidential campaign in the United States. Various calculations show that his Democratic Party opponent, Albert Gore, mustered several hundred thousand votes more. However, following a pause, clearly caused by confusion and obvious embarrassment amongst Washington’s top-echelon leaders, the Supreme Court took over the case, which decided by a margin of just one vote that the presidential mandate should go to Mr Bush. Today, the democracy zealots in Washington tend to forget this episode. Thus, the 43rd US President made it to the White House by the will of Justices of the Supreme Court, not because of the popular vote. However, the Supreme Court is just the apex of the US national judicial system, and its illegal decision, which contradicts the principles of democracy, exposes all the vices rife throughout the US judicial system.
All the preachers of American democracy extol the allegedly unrestricted freedom of the press in the US as a model that all others should follow. None other than the US Government Accountability Office, which found out that the Bush Administration used billions of dollars from the federal budget for policy propaganda in the mass media, questioned this paradigm. Recently, the Washington Post admitted in an article that its editor-in-chief, and his counterpart at New York Times, received a summons to come to the White House (when President Bush was present) and they received instructions not to publish negative information about the Administration’s performance. That this isn’t an outdated concern for the free press of “democratic” America was borne out by the recent arrest, on Washington’s demand, of WikiLeaks website founder Julian Assange, who washed America’s dirty linen in public without permission. There’s a lot more to say about the unattractive manifestations of American democracy. The self-assured and opinionated Washington missionaries yearn to teach lessons in true democracy to the world. However, they would certainly do better if they looked into their own political mirror.
15 December 2010
Valentin Zorin
A View from Moscow
Voice of Russia World Service
