Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Today Dutch Voters Told Geert Wilders, Vladimir Putin And Vladimir Trump To Go To Hell

>




Holland voted in parliamentary elections today, electing all 150 members of the House of Representatives. I lived there for nearly 4 years and never could get a firm grasp on their particular brand of multi-party coalition politics. There were 28 parties competing for seats in Parliament today. By this evening, the European headlines were blaring that the Freedom Party (PVV) of neo-fascist politician Geert Wilders-- a Trump ally-- had done unexpectedly badly and that center-right Prime Minister Mark Rutte would be back as head of government. We can be happy Wilders got slapped down, but Rutte is no bargain.

The Dutch had no intention of giving Putin an easy win by allowing him to hack-- for real hack, not the bullshit about propaganda-- the electronic voting machines the way he did in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and Michigan. The Dutch switched to paper ballots. They had near record-breaking turnout (81%) and turned Wilders' and Putin's names to schijten (see, I told you I lived there for 4 years). The U.S. will never admit Putin hacked the machines in fear that no one will vote. Instead, they should switch to paper ballots like the Dutch did.

Yesterday the last Ipsos poll predicted the top 7 parties would come out of today's election with this many seats in Parliament:
center-right VVD- 29 from 40
religious right of center CDA- 23 from 13
fascist PVV- 20 from 12
centrist Labor Party PvdA- 9 from 35
progressivish D66- 18 from 12
left of center Socialist Party SP- 15 from 15
left of center Green Party GL- 15 from 4
Earlier in the week, several polls had shown Wilders' PVV beating the VVD and winning the most seats. The projected score-- number of seats-- as of this evening is:
VVD- 33
CDA- 19
PVV- 20
D66- 19
GL- 14
SP- 14
PvdA- 9
So the hackish centrist Mark Rutte will be Prime Minister again-- of another unpopular, ineffective, dysfunctional conservative government wedded to the kind of failed Austerity Paul Ryan is eager to import into America. Wilders had been endorsed yesterday by the French fascist candidate Marine Le Pen, although that doesn't seem to have helped him at all. He polled something between 17 and 18% nationally.

Although the fascists won in Rotterdam, the Green Party finished first in Amsterdam with 19.3%, followed by D66 with 18.2%. Rutte's VVD came in 3rd with 15.2% and Wilders' fascists came in 6th with just 7%. Nationally, the Green-Left Party, headed by 30 year old Jesse "Jessiah" Klaver, quadrupled their 4 seats and are suddenly a real power in Parliament. Klaver is often compared to Justin Trudeau-- there's a slight physical resemblance-- but he is definitely the anti-Wilders guy-- son of a Moroccan father and an Indonesian-descended mother-- he sounded more like Bernie Sanders than like Trudeau. "What I would say to all my leftwing friends in Europe: don’t try to fake the populace. Stand for your principles. Be straight. Be pro-refugee. Be pro-European. We’re gaining momentum in the polls. And I think that’s the message we have to send to Europe. You can stop populism." In a much-talked about TV debate he told Wilders that it was rightwing populism, not Muslim immigration, that was undermining Dutch culture and traditions. "The values the Netherlands stands for-- for many, many decades, centuries actually-- its freedom, its tolerance, its empathy… they are destroying it. It’s terrible when people are born in the Netherlands have the feeling they are not part of this society and it is not something to be proud of, but something to be ashamed of. And I want to change that."

As Colonel Morris Davis tweeted this morning, "Too bad for Wilders there's no Electoral College where finishing in 2nd place can still be a win."

Rutte begins negotiating with his coalition partners-- presumably the CDA and D66-- tomorrow and, since he won, he gets to pick this evening's goodnight song-- his favorite:



Labels: , , ,

6 Comments:

At 10:07 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Their parliamentary coalition making is better. Gives voters many more choices, even if some are nuanced versions of others. It's still better.

81% turnout? The us will never even get 81% of eligibles registered much less turn out. Of our eligibles, the turnout is only about half.

paper ballots? hand counted? saved? verifiable? unhackable? Too simple for americans. Also... americans really want hackable voting. The Rs can cheat. The Ds can cheat. Russia can cheat. And all have.

Holland has democracy. The us has a mirage of a charade of a pretense. We're a fascist tyranny of the money. Any American voter who thinks otherwise is a fool.

We're a nation of fools.

 
At 1:11 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

We can be assured that whatever hacking of electronic voting machines that may have occurred in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and Michigan was accomplished by domestic actors.

Care to give any evidence to the claim it was devil-Putin?

Are we going to believe GOP-controlled congressional investigations on this matter? IF such investigations occur --- committees will order, and receive, CIA-manufactured "evidence" that switches the blame from the GOP, itself, to Russia? You know the great experiment is over when we must rely on those two institutions of blatant fascism.

The cold irony, is, of course, that, even IF Putin's alleged involvement were true, it would clearly show that he had a more accurate assessment of what it was going to take to win the 2016 US presidential elections than did its losing candidate, who spent $1.2 billion acting as if the campaign were no more than her national pre-coronation tour.

And, IF Putin/Russian hacking were true, the Dems have only themselves to blame for sitting idly by, since their 2000 cowardly capitulation to George the-Profoundly-Impaired***, as proprietary corporate electronic voting machines were being installed across the country.

After the Dems clearly revealed their own penchant for intramural election fraud, in primaries against Sanders, perhaps we can conclude that the Dems did essentially nothing to resist the switch to imminently-hackable electronic systems because they thought the DNC would be able to commandeer them. They forgot, like HRC forgot about the electoral college, that this would only be possible if they controlled the state governments, of which they have 16!!! firmly in hand. (By recent DWT count.)

Are we to presume that comrade devil, himself, also invented, implemented and ran the Crosscheck voter suppression system?

---------
*** and don't forget his side-kick, Dick "makes Putin look like George- the-Profoundly-Impaired" Cheney.

John Puma

 
At 6:03 AM, Blogger Gadfly said...

Per the first commenter, given that Holland has multiparty parliamentary government with proportional representation, they said "nyet" to both Donald Trump AND Hillary Clinton + Bernie Sanders. Remember, the Dutch Greens were the big winners.

Lessons for the US? Fight for proportional representation wherever halfway reasonable. Fight for alternatives to first-past-the-post whenever reasonable. Fight for easier ballot access to third parties. Fight to restore fusion candidacies.

All things you Down With Tyranny folks support, right?

 
At 7:46 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

John, fine post. But methinks you have the pro/antagonist - sidekick relationship reversed ;-)
As I mentioned above, both so-called "parties" reserve the right to hack as a mode of delivering the money's predetermined outcomes. The intramural comment was salient.

Gadfly, been saying this same thing for 40 years. So, speaking only for myself, I'd love to see several lefty parties as well as bury the democraps under a mountain of spent reactor fuel rods (so nobody would ever think of digging them up again).

My own theory is that as the choices on the left become representative, many of the 120 million who never vote might decide to join in the party (presuming that voting is done in a way similar to the Dutch) and the Nazi right would become irrelevant forever. My hope anyway.

The Dutch "big winners" were the entire left spectrum, assuming the ruling coalition becomes what the article speculates. That's the beauty of this kind of government. Nobody gets 51% so you have to negotiate a coalition. And that means you have to come to an agreement with those more left of the "winner", the rather centrists.

81%. That's the number that pleases me the most. Democracy cannot occur when more people don't vote than do.

 
At 8:25 AM, Anonymous Hone said...

Yay Dutchies!!! They lived fascism so they have a much better perspective than Americans. Visiting Anne Frank house is a must for any visitor to Amsterdam.

Too bad they are stuck with a conservative, but much better than a fascist.

 
At 9:31 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Gadfly, I would posit that your Clinton+sanders meme is inoperative. Clinton is the anti-Sanders. I truly believe that most Sanders voters would never have voted for Clinton had the R been someone less... Nazi than the orange-utang. And a lot of them still did not vote for that corrupt monster.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home