Americans suffer from Charlie Brown syndrome

Followers of the comic strip Peanuts know that every fall Lucy would con Charlie Brown into kicking the football by promising she would hold it. Falling for her promise every time, ol’ Charlie Brown would run at the ball and, as he lifted his foot to kick it, Lucy would pull it away and Charlie Brown would wind up splat on the ground.

Americans are like the gullible and delusional Charlie Brown every election cycle—be it state and local elections, off-year congressional elections or presidential elections—in being snookered by the rhetoric that spews from politicians’ mouth, completely oblivious to the powerful interests behind the curtain who are the ones that actually pick the Republican and Democratic candidates and decide the outcome of the general elections.

Every election cycle, the majority of voters march to the polls to cast ballots for one of the major party candidates they deem less evil—never mind less evil is still evil—in the delusional belief they will choose the winner.

Most are in denial about the elephant in the room: easily rigged voting systems on which votes can be flipped without leaving a trace. On Oct. 21, NBC’s Chuck Todd went so far as to tweet: “The voting machine conspiracies belong in same category as the Trump birther garbage.”

Todd, NBC’s chief White House correspondent, either has failed to look at the work done by Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org, read her book, Black Box Voting: Vote Tampering in the 21st Century, or the work done by Victoria Collier and a host of computer experts or is part of the denial crowd or just turned a blind eye to not upset his corporate bosses and keep his job. Moreover, it’s too much to expect that he’s read Votescam: The Stealing of America by James M. Collier and Kenneth F. Collier, the late uncle and father of Victoria Collier, who devoted 25 years of their lives documenting election thefts—thefts that occurred even before electronic voting and tabulation systems.

The corporate media still insists that George W. Bush was elected in 2000, despite Florida’s hanging chads and butterfly ballots debacle, despite the US Supreme Court halting a full recount of the ballots and installing Bush in the White House. Instead of fixing that mess by returning to hand-counted paper ballots, the corporate media acquiesced in Congress making things worse by giving its blessing to electronic voting systems whose software is owned by private (mainly Republican) companies, It bothers the corporate media not that the courts have ruled the software is proprietary, therefore, neither election officials or the public can look at it.

Hence, we have a system that is rigged from the get-go. We can’t even be sure if Barack Obama was elected fair and square or his victory in 2008 was the work of his corporate-Wall Street-bankster masters.

Voting in a truly democratic nation would be such a simple thing: You’re a citizen and entitled to vote; you make a mark next to the candidate of your choice on the ballot; the ballot is counted as you marked it; the candidate with the most votes wins; as civilized people we accept the outcome.

But we are not a truly democratic society. Nor are we civilized. We not only engage in voter suppression and intimidation, and dirty tricks, but the US Supreme Court in Citizens United opened the money floodgates to the corporations, which now possess personhood, and special interests who spend billions to flood the airwaves with worthless political ads filled with lies, distortions and omissions—anything but substance. The purpose of all that money, however, is a red herring when it comes to how people will cast their worthless votes. The money that pours into corporate TV and radio ads is to buy the silence of the corporate media, lest something of value to the people escapes their lips.

Yet, most Americans have been sold on the idea that “free elections” produce “freedom and democracy,” while the occupants of the White House go about bombing other peoples into “freedom and democracy” so they, too, can have “free elections.”

Thusly, many Americans are voting early, filling out absentee ballots or preparing to go to the polls on Nov. 6 in their deluded belief like Charlie Brown’s that Lucy won’t pull the football away at the last second and that they will choose the winners in the presidential, congressional, state and local elections. The majority will make their choices from Column D or Column R, with a minority once again choosing from third party columns the powers that be and the corporate media have deemed nonentities. The winners, especially in the presidential and congressional races, will actually be decided by the corporations-Wall Street-bankster masters and the elephant in the room will raise its trunk and trumpet in triumph.

Such is life in these United States and if one looks with a critical eye, it has always been so—it’s a matter of degree. But Americans are too filled with hubris, exceptionalism and being indispensable to notice that the world doesn’t laugh with us, it laughs at us while shuddering at the thought of what mayhem we will commit next.

Bev Conover is the editor and publisher of Intrepid Report. Email her at editor@intrepidreport.com.