An interesting report in the New York Times came out some time ago about how President Jair Bolsonaro built the myth of stolen elections in Brazil.
According to a group journalist research, Bolsonaro had been attacking the electronic election system for years. One of his claims had been, patterns in vote results show proof of fraud. He repeatedly said that election officials count votes in secret, suggesting they could manipulate results.
He said the votes are sent to Brasilia; they go to a secret room! “My God. The count should be public, but it goes to a secret room.”
He suspected hackers tried to steal the presidential election from him in 2018, but it failed. According to him, hackers would divert 12 million votes from him, but he admitted he had no proof, and didn’t know if it was true. But that is the story we are investigating, he said.
Those claims are false, according to Brazil’s election officials, fact-checking agencies and independent election-security experts who have studied the country’s electronic voting system.
Yet in speeches, interviews and hundreds of posts on social media, the president has consistently and methodically, repeated those baseless claims and many others about Brazil’s voting system.
The result has been a yearslong campaign that has undermined millions of Brazilian’s faiths in the elections that underpin one of the world’s largest democracies. In a poll this month, three out of four of Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters said they have little or no trust in Brazil’s voting machines.
According to the report which came out slightly before the elections, while Mr. Bolsonaro has warned of voter fraud for years, he has never lost an election in three decades in politics. However, in the contest for president he not only faced defeat, he literally lost fair and square. He suggested he would accept it, and anyone who follows politics is well aware, he didn’t.
Sounds to me like he’s a sore loser. Apart from waiting several days to concede his loss, he acting like a small child who lost a game like chess. Actually, I’m guilty of such a crime, as according to my parents I used to sweep the chess pieces all over the carpet with my arm from outrage. But then I must have been five or six, not a fully grown man in his sixties.
In the article it wrote his actual spoken words before the election which read as follows: “especially for me: arrest, death or victory. Tell those bastards I will never be arrested.
Well as most of us are already aware he fled to Florida using government paid expenses and his privileged position to enter the country. His exit came at a critical moment, as Lula, the incoming president of Brazil had to receive the passing of the sash (ribbon) as is customary on 1st January, 2023 when he took office.
Well that never occurred as Bozo as many like to call him was in the USA, avoiding responsibility, and unsettling residents around the house he was residing. Crowd followers who have been sucked into his madness were running after him like he was Elvis Presley or Michael Jackson.
Anyway, to cut a story short and not bore you with excessive reading which fuels his offbeat composure, the New York Times created a very clear and concise report which was based on hundreds of hours of Mr. Bolsonaro’s interviews, speeches, and weekly livestreams and thousands of his social-media posts to map his efforts over eight years to criticize or question the voting system.
In other words, he’s a serial bullshit artist who has managed to pull the wool over people’s eyes in an attempt to overthrow democracy and booster his ego in what could have been a serious error in the way Brazilian politics is conducted. This detail highlighted the need for Brazil’s Supreme Court called STF which stands for over 200 years. Many contest its legitimacy, but Alexandre Moraes, one of the magistrates stood up and went above board to squash, clearly what many see as a brutal fascist style president who was too big for his boots.
As the ex-president of Brazil likes to say people have, ‘Freedom of speech’ as one of their rights, but what he and his followers don’t realize is that he took his people off the track of democracy, and instead created a hostile environment which has had devastating consequences.
Have a terrific day!
Prof. Carl Boniface
Vocabulary builder:
Fair and square (idiom) = If you say that someone won a competition fair and square, you mean that they won honestly and without cheating. There are no excuses. We were beaten fair and square.
Sore loser (idiom) = (informal) One who complains or blames others for one's loss; one who is easily angered by losing a game or contest, or because of some other misfortune or bad luck.
To cut a long story short (phrase) = used for saying that you will tell the end or the main point of a story without giving all the details. To cut a long story short, we both spent the night in jail.
Pull the wool over people’s eyes (idiom) = to trick or deceive someone: to hide the truth from someone. He was too clever to let them pull the wool over his eyes.
Too big for his boots (idiom) = behaving as if you are more important than you really are: He's been getting a bit too big for his boots since he got that promotion. Showing arrogance and conceit.