As the most important British General Election since the last one nears I’d like to remind myself and others about how exactly this world works under the current system(s) of government prevalent in the Western Hemisphere. There is one person’s name that illustrates how things work more than any other that springs to mind. You will probably have never heard of it before.

Margie Schoedinger. She died aged 38 of a gunshot wound to the head in Missouri City, a suburb of the American city of Houston on the 22nd September 2003. You can check that fact here: http://bit.ly/8ZrhA3, that’s the Fort Bend County public records. Not much detail, sorry. So have you ever heard of Margie Schoedinger?

I bet you’ve heard of Monica Lewinsky. She is famous for having President Clinton shove a cigar up her vagina and for performing fellatio on him and getting his semen on her dress. Type Monica Lewinsky into Google and you get 662,000 results. Her Wikipedia entry is substantial and heavily referenced. The Starr Report that investigated her relationship to President Clinton led to his impeachment. That cigar that went up her nearly brought down the head of the most powerful nation in the world. The mainstream American press and numerous right wing commentators fed on the story for months.

Type Margie Schoedinger into Google. You’ll only get 3,550 results and when I first heard her name it was just dozens. You won’t find any search results that lead back to any major news networks, certainly not Fox, CNN etc. Her Wikipedia entry is four sentences long. From that entry http://bit.ly/17GkZc you can see why some people might think she’d be better known. She filed charges of rape and physical abuse against an incumbent President, in this case George W. Bush. She did this in December 2002 and that is a matter of public record. I would link you to the records but for some reason Fort Bend County have now removed them from their website. I did read them fully myself, shortly after her death, which I only found out about because I was trawling through conspiracy websites whilst researching my novel Goodnight Horses.

At first I was sceptical; I’d been reading a lot of ridiculous conspiracy websites backed up by very little evidence. However, hidden amongst the ridiculous I would find real stories too; I remember reading about Abu Ghraib prison and the torture and deaths going on there at least 18 months before it was covered in the mainstream news. I remember thinking, surely this can’t be true or else the BBC would be covering it. It was all true, every horrible detail and it didn’t turn up on the BBC until a year and a half after independent journalists had been putting their lives at risk to get the story out. I do mean literally putting their lives at risk; just prior to the invasion of Iraq the US military clearly and openly stated to many independent journalists (including a bemused Kate Adie) that not only would they not safeguard any journalists unwilling to be embedded with US or UK military units but that they would in fact target them if they got “in the way”.

Anyhow, back in the USA a couple of reporters certainly not working for mainstream news companies finally took an interest in Margie Schoedinger’s story after Pravda, the Russian news service, ran the story http://bit.ly/a7SDtZ. It was run in Russia before it ever appeared in the USA. If this had been a time before the internet no one would ever have known. This piece http://bit.ly/qQqKm by Jackson Thoreau (possibly a pseudonym or so I’m led to believe) gives the best overview and deals generally with the case and its oddities and inconsistencies. This article http://bit.ly/BEr1W deals more with the lack of media scrutiny and shows that at least one British newspaper took some notice.

What’s known to be true about the case of Margie Schoedinger is that she did file charges against George W. Bush alleging that he sexually assaulted both her and her husband. She further brought charges against the Sugar Land County police force for harassment and assault. When questioned about this by journalists the Sugar Land police lied and said no charges had been filed. The journalists found the files confirming the charges. Sugar Land police did however discover that George W Bush had dated Margie when she was a minor, he did know her at one time. Margie Schoedinger did not seek publicity. She was extremely reluctant to meet or talk to journalists. She made no money from her allegations. There have been suggestions that she was mentally ill but there is no evidence of this from her reported behaviour or her history. She died from a gunshot wound to the head which the coroner judged to be self inflicted. It is very, very rare for women to choose this method for suicide. It is much more likely amongst males.

Trawl through the search results on Google. There isn’t much information about this woman. There is nothing that’s really negative or damning about her, just mostly the facts of the case as above. Most of all there is a vacuum of mainstream interest in Margie Schoedinger. I cannot say whether her allegations were true, whether she was deranged and delusional. As I said she didn’t file the charges in order to get famous and make money. Why she did and whether they were true we can’t now know as she died from a shotgun being fired into her face.

I’m not interested in whether Margie’s allegations were true. Not anymore. I’m mainly interested in the fact that almost every major news agency in the entire world ignored a story handed to them, fully backed by filed court charges, with allegations of a violent and sexual nature against the most highly placed man in the United States of America. Let’s face it, George W Bush wasn’t much out of the newspapers for his two terms in office and was always a figure of controversy, constantly attacked by the mainstream and left wing, constantly defended by the mainstream and the right wing. So why did every single major news network in America and 99% of every other news networks in the world choose to deliberately ignore the story of Margie Schoedinger, all at the same time? Because that’s when they were offered the information – all of them at the same time, just when the charges had been filed. These are the same media outlets that a few years previously had covered the Clinton-Lewinsky story, without exception, every single day for years.

When you’re going to the polling booth this week think about Margie Schoedinger. Then think about the person and the party you’re about to vote for. Think about the media coverage you’ve seen concerning the election. Think about all the bad bits and all the good bits. Then think about the other bits you haven’t seen. That would be most of it; most of the election has happened off screen for everyone. There isn’t enough screen time and newsprint in the world to cover every single part of an election, so that’s fair enough. But think to yourself, who decided what I should see about the election, what policies I should know about, what incidents, what quotes, what people. Who decided? Someone decided that we didn’t need to know about Margie Schoedinger; well, lots of people all over the world did although I don’t know their names and probably never will. Think about that then, this week, think about the people who decide what you should think about and how you don’t even know their names. Mind you, you probably didn’t know Margie Schoedinger’s name before reading this but you do now.