Undemocratic Democrats

[Tiger in Spain 0]

What is it about democracy that Democrats don't like?

Most of the Democratic Presidential candidates, along with most Democratic Senators, voted in favor of the Iraqi War resolution of October 2002. But now that the war is over, they say they were duped by the administration's lies about weapons of mass destruction and connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. They want out, and pronto.

The democratization of Iraq doesn't count a whit with them.

We should not be surprised by this, since they don't seem to care much for democracy in the U.S. either.

In Florida in 2000, they tried to undo the vote count as certified by mostly their own election night counters because ballots approved by Democratic local officials were (they decided after the fact) defective. In 2001 and 2002, they tried to hold the Senate hostage until, they supposed, the 2002 elections would give them a working majority. When the elections went the other way, they redoubled their wrench-in-the-gears strategy, with filibusters, threats of filibusters and other tactics designed to prevent the Republican majority from accomplishing anything that might reflect credit on the Administration or Congress.

And don't forget that the 2002 elections would almost certainly have given the Republicans yet another US Senator if the Democrats hadn't managed to contravene New Jersey election laws and allow their dead loser of a candidate, Robert Torricelli to be replaced on the ballot long after the time for such changes had expired.

This year, when the duly elected legislators of Texas attempted to exercise their prerogative to draw Congressional district maps, the Democrats bolted to a Holiday Inn in Oklahoma rather than let the legislature vote on a map that would fairly respect the true partisan split in the state (as opposed to the gerrymandered one drawn up by a bunch of Democrat judges in 2001). Texas State Senators later pulled a reprise of the Where's Waldo act by absconding to New Mexico.

Democratic hatred for democracy has been further exhibited in recent weeks by a furious demand that the President renounce and pull from the airwaves an innocuous commercial which makes the startling claim that Democrats object to his Iraqi policy. They said he was impugning their patriotism. Of course, they can run ads accusing Bush of lying about Iraq, deliberately poisoning the environment, starving schoolchildren and being the Boston Strangler, but the minute he criticizes them, you'd think he'd set the burglars loose at the Watergate.

The criticism of the first little Bush advertising message is a harbinger of things to come, by the way. Look for the paranoia to get more and more intense as the campaign rolls on. The Democrats remember how, by screaming the words "Willie Horton" in 1992, they intimidated Bush the Elder's campaign into avoiding any serious negative messages, a prime cause of his loss that year.

But I digress. The latest example of Democratic antipathy toward democracy comes from that bastion of clean and fair elections, the state of Illinois. There, where the legislature is completely controlled by the Democrats, the destruction of democracy has reached Orwellian proportions.

In Illinois, in 2004, the name of George W. Bush will not, as of now, be allowed on the ballot. State law specifies that the ballot must be certified in August; but the GOP National Convention isn't until September. So, a minor change in the law was required. But instead of simply making the change, the Democratic legislative leadership tacked a provision onto the bill that would allow the State Board of Elections to waive a bunch of election law fines, including a whopping $797,600 judgment against Secretary of State Jesse White, and others against no less than 14 Democratic Senators, none of whom bothered to recuse himself from the vote. Senate Republicans rightly refused to support such a blatantly corrupt measure, so the bill failed, and unless it is revised, Bush's name will not be on the ballot in Illinois; to win the state's electoral votes he will have to run a write-in campaign.

Town Hall

[Ranger12 53]

Well said. Isn't duplicity a great thing?

[Donutboy 0]

Unfortunately, as was pointed out yesterday, the Bush administration doesn't want the Iraqis to set up their own "true" democracy. They want to impose a puppet-government with representatives chosen by the Bush administration. They don't want a government with majority-rule because that would give power to the Shiites and the Shiites are not friends with the Bushes. We can't risk losing those lucrative oil contracts that Bush Inc. wants to buy with our $87.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies.

[TitanTiger 21,241]

Unfortunately, as was pointed out yesterday, the Bush administration doesn't want the Iraqis to set up their own "true" democracy. They want to impose a puppet-government with representatives chosen by the Bush administration. They don't want a government with majority-rule because that would give power to the Shiites and the Shiites are not friends with the Bushes. We can't risk losing those lucrative oil contracts that Bush Inc. wants to buy with our $87.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies.

Actually no one has said anything about a puppet government except naysayers like you.

And a majority Shiite gov't isn't just a concern for the US, the Sunnis and Kurds aren't keen on it either.

[Donutboy 0]

Unfortunately, as was pointed out yesterday, the Bush administration doesn't want the Iraqis to set up their own "true" democracy. They want to impose a puppet-government with representatives chosen by the Bush administration. They don't want a government with majority-rule because that would give power to the Shiites and the Shiites are not friends with the Bushes. We can't risk losing those lucrative oil contracts that Bush Inc. wants to buy with our $87.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies.

Actually no one has said anything about a puppet government except naysayers like you.

And a majority Shiite gov't isn't just a concern for the US, the Sunnis and Kurds aren't keen on it either.

So, would you have us set up a minority ruled government as was done in South Africa? I think we should have already learned how well that social experiment worked!! The only true democracy is majority rule. If we had trouble with the majority ethnic group in Iraq and didn't intend to allow them to use their majority power, wouldn't we have been better off leaving Saddam in power instead of setting up a US-friendly government and calling it a democracy? Without majority rule, no democracy will last and we will leave nothing in our wake but the civil disheval we're already seeing.

[Tiger Al 0]

Actually no one has said anything about a puppet government except naysayers like you.

And a majority Shiite gov't isn't just a concern for the US, the Sunnis and Kurds aren't keen on it either.

Here's a little article I ran across that talks about Ahmad Chalabi, the 'heir apparent' to the Iraqi presidency.

For forty-five years, Iraqi Ahmad Chalabi ate the hard bread of exile. To ease his woes he established a bank, Petra Bank, in Jordan. When the bank went bust, Chalabi switched countries. On the way out he made $500 million vanish into thin air, robbing thousands of shareholders.

In 1992, a Jordanian court tried him in absentia and sentenced him to twenty years of prison and hard labor. That same year the Iraqi National Congress was formed in London and Chalabi was consecrated as leader of the democratic opposition to the corrupt tyranny of Saddam Hussein.

The ubiquitous chorus of resentful foes conspired against him in the years that followed and accused him of taking a cut of contributions from the CIA. One of the absent-minded acts on the list of charges against him was pocketing $4 million.

None of this kept Chalabi from becoming the favorite adviser for the forces that recently invaded Iraq. His collaboration enabled the invaders to lie with admirable sincerity during and after the slaughter that they carried out. And President Bush confirmed that he had been a good choice: This new ally had the same habits as his friends at Enron.

Since 1958, Chalabi had not set foot in Iraq. Finally, he made it back. He is now the favorite mascot of the occupation forces.

[Jenny AU-92 0]

I dispute the "favorite mascot" part - your data is old. See this CNN article from September of this year. Bush folks aren't 100% keen on him, and neither are many Iraqis.

Chalabi at Odds With Bush Administration

A Pentagon favorite who was provided millions of dollars in assistance for years as founding leader of the Iraqi National Congress, one of the foremost opposition groups, Chalabi once seemed to be in lock step with the Bush White House.

The U.S. military even airlifted him into Iraq after the war. Now he seems out of step with Washington.

"The only path to full Iraqi sovereignty is through a written constitution, ratified and followed by free, democratic elections. Shortcutting the process would be dangerous," L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, told a congressional committee Wednesday.

Chalabi, who is this month's president of the U.S.-appointed council, continues to applaud the Bush administration for its role in toppling Saddam Hussein.

"We have no disagreement with the U.S. government. We are not at odds with the U.S.," Chalabi said.

But the Bush administration is not being quite as diplomatic. One senior administration official suggested Chalabi and other council members were "biting the hand that feeds them."

Another senior administration official pointedly noted that Chalabi was just one of the members of the appointed council.

Even in Iraq, the 58-year-old Chalabi is not without his critics. Some oppose him because he left the country as a teenager in the 1950s and spent most of his life abroad.

[TitanTiger 21,241]

So, would you have us set up a minority ruled government as was done in South Africa? I think we should have already learned how well that social experiment worked!! The only true democracy is majority rule. If we had trouble with the majority ethnic group in Iraq and didn't intend to allow them to use their majority power, wouldn't we have been better off leaving Saddam in power instead of setting up a US-friendly government and calling it a democracy? Without majority rule, no democracy will last and we will leave nothing in our wake but the civil disheval we're already seeing.

Why does every debate with you make me feel like I'm fighting with the pendulum of a grandfather clock? One extreme or the other with you. Sheesh.

How do you manage to assume that because I mention a very real concern about a Shiite controlled gov't that I mean we need to set up a minority controlled one, much less one that was like the apartheid gov't of South Africa?

As I said yesterday on this subject (which apparently went in one ear and our the other unobstructed), there are many concerns to weigh here before just rushing to install a "democracy" in Iraq. I don't know why this is such a hard concept for you to grasp. I thought liberals were supposed to be the "champion of the minority". Can you not understand the concerns the Sunnis and Kurds have, given the history of this region. Do you not think that we need to take a very deliberate and careful pace toward democracy here to ensure that the rights and protection of all groups are maintained with proper checks and balances?

Oh wait, I forgot. The only way you can use this to bash Bush is if you take the completely illogical and untenable position you're arguing.

[Jenny AU-92 0]

EXACTLY, TT. You hit the nail on the head - in Iraq, simple "majority rule" is NOT going to work at first until all the other ethnic groups, who have been mortal enemies with the Shiites for thousands of years, see that they will have equal footing and that no "revenge" will be taken by the Shiites against anyone else if they do get majority control - which they probably will. A coalition type democracy will probably be the best way to go for a while, if not forever. Like in the Seante - the Republicans have a majority, but it takes a supermajority to get certain things done.

The dems and the Republicans in this country may not get along, but when one party takes control of the Congress or the White House away from the other party, they don't go around decapitating the opposition leaders in order to consolidate their power. :roll: