Why am I not surprised?

Somehow, this news did not come as a surprise to me:

President Robert G. Mugabe's party routed its opponents in parliamentary elections, nearly complete returns showed Friday, dashing forecasts of an opposition surge and solidifying the president's 25-year grip on Zimbabwe politics.

The NY Times, which provided the above quotation, goes on to say that

The lopsided outcome cast fresh doubts on the strength and strategy of the opposition, as well as the fairness of the vote. Mr. Mugabe's opponents, who lost elections in 2000 and 2002 that were widely condemned as rigged, again charged fraud in Thursday's election.

Let's just hope that Jimmy Carter wasn't there to put his imprimatur on what I strongly suspect was another rigged election. Considering that Mugabe has cast his once prosperous country into the worst kind of proverty, and considering that he kept imprisoning his opponents, I just don't get the feeling that this was, ya' know, a fair kind of election. It's actually a fairly good NY Times article,* so you may want to read it to get an idea of what's going on in that beleaguered nation. *My snide aside is that the NY Times doesn't have any grounds to stick it to Bush with respect to Zimbabwe, so it doesn't have any reason to be biased in this article.