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rfmcdonaldLooking through my Livejournal friends page, I've noticed three trends, patterns of behaviour adopted in response to Bush's election.
1. American Livejournal users frequently express interest in emigrating.
2. Non-American Livejournal users frequently offer advice to their American counterparts on how to immigrate.
3. Almost everyone is complaining about the election results. Scratch that; everyone is.
I'd suspected that Kerry lacked enough of a positive identity to really galvanize voters behind him, that the failure to identify him as anyone but "not-Bush" presaged his failure at the polls. Given the Democratic Party's inability to come up with a more convincing candidate (Hillary will have to wait until 2008), the Republican Party might have needed to sabotage its own candidacy. The best way to do so, barring unlikely heated debates over policy, would have been with a simple scandal. It would have to be something GUBU, as the Irish say, the word originally Prime Minister Haughey's acronym for grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, and unprecedented. Something like this happened in Turkey in 1996, when Abdallah Catli, heroin smuggler and leader of the Grey Wolves, died in a car crash. He wasn't the only casualty, not by any measure.
Of course, it's entirely open to question whether or not anything remotely similar to the Susurlik crash existed in relationship to Bush and Cheney. Arguably and cynically, that kind of stuff has been revealed already by one of the recent tell-all books. Even so, one can dream.
1. American Livejournal users frequently express interest in emigrating.
2. Non-American Livejournal users frequently offer advice to their American counterparts on how to immigrate.
3. Almost everyone is complaining about the election results. Scratch that; everyone is.
I'd suspected that Kerry lacked enough of a positive identity to really galvanize voters behind him, that the failure to identify him as anyone but "not-Bush" presaged his failure at the polls. Given the Democratic Party's inability to come up with a more convincing candidate (Hillary will have to wait until 2008), the Republican Party might have needed to sabotage its own candidacy. The best way to do so, barring unlikely heated debates over policy, would have been with a simple scandal. It would have to be something GUBU, as the Irish say, the word originally Prime Minister Haughey's acronym for grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, and unprecedented. Something like this happened in Turkey in 1996, when Abdallah Catli, heroin smuggler and leader of the Grey Wolves, died in a car crash. He wasn't the only casualty, not by any measure.
On November 3, a truck crashed into a Mercedes Benz in Susurluk, 90 miles south of Istanbul, and killed three Turkish passengers: a fugitive heroin smuggler and hitman, a former high-ranking police officer, and a former "Miss Cinema." The lone survivor was a rightwing member of parliament. In the car's trunk, police found a forged passport, police identification papers, ammunition, silencers and machine guns.
Abdallah Catli, the fugitive heroin smuggler, had escaped from a Swiss prison. The dead beauty queen, Gonca Uz, was his girlfriend.
The police officer was Huseyin Kocadag, head of a Turkish police academy and a former Istanbul deputy police chief who reportedly organized hit squads in the southeast that kill Kurdish guerrillas and their supporters.
The survivor, Sedat Bucak, a member of parliament from the conservative True Path Party is reportedly in charge of 2,000 Kurdish mercenaries paid by the government to fight Kurdish guerrillas.
The car carsh has created a sensation in Turkey and had led parliament to hold hearings on the ties linking the True Path Party, the police, and thugs like Abdullah Catli. Newspapers in Turkey are making connections between what they are calling the "state gang" and a secret paramilitary force that for decades has attacked the left.
Of course, it's entirely open to question whether or not anything remotely similar to the Susurlik crash existed in relationship to Bush and Cheney. Arguably and cynically, that kind of stuff has been revealed already by one of the recent tell-all books. Even so, one can dream.
