Monday, January 30, 2006

More proposal

Actually, I think the better title for the series would be "Ask Victor Yanukovych." So here goes:

Pictures of the people on the square, babushkas smiling their shiny-faced smiles, flag wavers and the rest. Some music of the Maidan is played.

Narrator: "Beginning Novermber 21st, people began to gather on the square in numbers that would quickly reach the hundreds of thousands. They gathered on the Maidan to protest a fraudulent election and a corrupt regime. They gathered to take back their rights..."

Cue the sound of tanks (or maybe the sound of a number of marching boots...maybe that won't play well in the east...maybe wouldn't want it to play in the east...haven't thought this out...)

Narrator: "...But on November 28th, while the square was filled with people, the government ordered military units from outside of Kiev to converge on the Maidan. Those units were on the move and were only stopped at the last minute by the actions of a group of patriot Ukrainians.

"What were those troops going to Maidan for?

Ask Victor Yanukovych."

A commenter asks if these would be played on TV stations owned by some of the eastern interests? Maybe not but I don't think they would be useful in the east. Many there would simply say, "Well, those who stopped them weren't patriots and they should have cleared the whole CIA supported crowd off the square."

This can be laid at Yuschenko's feet and should be. That there haven't been any kinds of attempts to bring the east into the fold at all is a real serious failing of Yuschenko and his government. And this is after his perfect pitch during the revolution. "I ask the PM to bring in more people from the east. We will feed them and make them warm and tell what this is all about," is the kind of thing he said.

So they wouldn't be effective in the east anyway.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

sounds like a great commercial.

Yuschenko, for all his failures, isn't Yanukovich. And what better display of Yanu's leadership style than the way he wanted to deal with the OR.

I'd like to hear a populist candidate talk about reprivatizing like six more big firms and using the funds to set up an investment fund whose interest would be distributed among all Ukrainians, in a way similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund, albeit at a smaller scale of around a 100 dollars a year.

The point is to take a bite out of poverty and provide more income security for people in the future in a way that Yanukovich would never do.

Then hit him hard with truth-telling on what sort of leader he would be.

dlw
dlw

DLW said...

I wish I could share with Ukrainians some of the ideas of Saul Alinsky and Gandhi. They make for an interesting contrast that merits further consideration.

dlw