jrdaustin said:
Ahh, so if they cannot have a perfect election, might as well have none at all and keep the existing regime in power.
I didn't realize that was how democracy worked.
And yes, I recognize that Ukraine has verbiage in their constitution that allows for Marshall law during wartime. That, however, detracts from them the concept of being able to call themselves a democracy.
I realize Russia definitely has the same problem, and I'm definitely not defending Russia.
But can you not see that the Zelensky regime was basically installed by us after we got involved with the removal of the prior Russia-friendly regime? In other words, NONE of it is truly democracy. And we're complicit. One of the reasons not to have elections is that WE might not like the outcome. I get that, but let's not then fool ourselves by calling Ukraine a democratic government.
It is amazing that the same people who point to irregularities in the 2020 US election and call it illegitimate also, hypocritically, say that even an imperfect election is better than no election and they would accept one even as they
also refuse to accept previous Ukrainian elections in the same breath. I'd venture a guess that everyone parroting this line would just move the goalposts and refuse to accept the results of a Ukrainian election if it were held tomorrow and Zelensky won. This post could be summed up as, "They should have an illegal election anyway so that we can refuse to accept it and accuse it of being just for show to prop up the chosen candidate of the US intel community."
Poroshenko, who Zelensky replaced, was the president we supposedly installed in 2014 and the basis of the argument that we were responsible for Russia invading Crimea right after Euromaidan. So are we expected to believe that the US, under the Trump admin no less, decided to just install another guy? That makes no sense.
Zelensky was also an actor/comedian before being elected, and he won with 74% of the popular vote. For one, I don't think anyone looking to install someone in the Ukrainian government would pick a comedian with no political experience as their guy to install. For two, even if they did, it's really ****ing hard to believe that kind of landslide victory is illegitimate when it isn't for the incumbent. You really want to argue that we somehow hijacked the Ukrainian elections in 2019 and we're able to get the opposition 74% of the vote with no one noticing? And then we did pretty much the same with their parliamentary elections right after?
The idea that, "the Zelensky regime was basically installed by us," is absurdly laughable.