How can we give them democracy if they insist on voting?

[shereads]

So now Iraqis are protesting our reasonable offer to appoint a democratic government, which would save them the frustration and expense of electing their own.

According to the Miami Herald, "...sources say that part of the problem is that there is no way to translate the word, 'caucus.'" (I didn't make that up.)

These people don't know what a caucus is, and they want to elect their own leaders? No wonder they're living in caves. I wonder if any of these voter wanna-bes have ever even eaten pancakes - much less ones served by a candidate for public office.

They're not ready for democracy.

This could take a while.

 

[wishfulthinking]

A bit of a contradiction that - no, you can't vote, but instead, how about a democracy, which gives you the right to vote.

I think it is very sad. It is a lose-lose situation for everyone. A new generation of terrorists that hate the US is being bred.

 

[shereads]

I think it is very sad. It is a lose-lose situation for everyone. A new generation of terrorists that hate the US is being bred.

My new charitable organization, "Pancakes for Freedom," is doing its best to help. I need funding, and advice on shipping. So far, the pancakes are arriving in Baghdad completely flat...Wait, they're supposed to be flat, right?

Nevermind. Just funding, then.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

We aren't breeding new terrorists who hate the U.S. they were already there. What we are doing is making a damned pitiful show in our faith in our own represenative democratic model of government.

-Colly

 

[minsue]

We aren't breeding new terrorists who hate the U.S. they were already there. What we are doing is making a damned pitiful show in our faith in our own represenative democratic model of government.

-Colly

*trying to let it go...can't quite help myself*

We lost faith in our own representative democractic model of government in 2000 after the majority of voters got screwed by the Electoral College & the Supreme Court.

*pant, pant...damn! I almost made it!*

- Mindy

 

[Lauren Hynde]

our reasonable offer to appoint a democratic government

Is there any other way?

This would be almost funny, if it weren't for... you know...

 

[Linbido]

We aren't breeding new terrorists who hate the U.S. they were already there. What we are doing is making a damned pitiful show in our faith in our own represenative democratic model of government.

-Colly

Never quite had any. What's wrong with one citizen, one vote? Regional representation offices seems kind of...old to me. That's why you have a two-party system instead of more diversity. That, and the President over cabinet over parlament status ladder.

On the other hand, the plethora of political parties in our parlaments leads to some quite tiresome coalition haggling after every election. And a broken alliance prompting reelection once in a while.

No, back to monarchy, I say. Who wants to be the King of Iraq?

 

[Lauren Hynde]

That's why you have a two-party system instead of more diversity. That, and the President over cabinet over parlament status ladder.

And that is why it will never change.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Never quite had any. What's wrong with one citizen, one vote? Regional representation offices seems kind of...old to me. That's why you have a two-party system instead of more diversity. That, and the President over cabinet over parlament status ladder.

On the other hand, the plethora of political parties in our parlaments leads to some quite tiresome coalition haggling after every election. And a broken alliance prompting reelection once in a while.

No, back to monarchy, I say. Who wants to be the King of Iraq?

If you look at the electoral map of the U.S. in the last election I think it is pretty apparent why we don't go with a direct democracy. The seaboard states, due to their massive urban centers would set policy for the whole of the country. The founding fathers feared direct democracy because it highly resembles mob rule. I for one am pretty comfortable with repreenative democracy. I could spend a few hours bitching about the failures of the two party system, especially recently, but it isn't any better or worse than a multi-party system probably.

-Colly

 

[Colleen Thomas]

*trying to let it go...can't quite help myself*

We lost faith in our own representative democractic model of government in 2000 after the majority of voters got screwed by the Electoral College & the Supreme Court.

*pant, pant...damn! I almost made it!*

- Mindy

A valiant effort

Some of us however gained more faith in a represenative system in 2000

-Colly

 

[shereads]

*trying to let it go...can't quite help myself*

We lost faith in our own representative democractic model of government in 2000 after the majority of voters got screwed by the Electoral College & the Supreme Court.

*pant, pant...damn! I almost made it!*

- Mindy

Min, what did we learn at the meetings? Call a buddy when you get these urges. We can get each other through this.

 

[Guest]

Aw, fuck it, I'm with Min. Let's get drunk too.

Perdita

 

[shereads]

Aw, fuck it, I'm with Min. Let's get drunk too.

Perdita

Whoa! I hope my Crack Smokers Anonymous buddy is a bit more strong-willed than that, Perdita. I'll never get off the streets if he or she caves that easily. "Aw, hell, shereads. Let's break into that Corolla, grab their tollbooth change and go score a rock."*

Yours is more of a 2-step program, isn't it? Get on wagon, fall off. On, off.








*"It's not a crack house; It's a crack home." -- Dennis Miller

 

[Guest]

Yours is more of a 2-step program, isn't it? Get on wagon, fall off. On, off.

Yeah, ella, I get more satisfaction that way. Isn't that the goal?

Perdita

 

[shereads]

A poignant and surreal true story from salon.com

The gamer of Baghdad

While missiles crashed around him, Zeyad struggled to keep Crash Bandicoot alive. Today, he continues to play, even as Baathist holdouts rage on and his frustrated countrymen demand a better future.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Wagner James Au



Jan. 20, 2004 _|_ While the shock-and-awe bombing raged outside, Zeyad spent a lot of time playing "Crash Bandicoot" on his Playstation. Bandicoot is a humanoid fox who must escape the dangers coming at him from all sides (polar bears, lethal blowfish and so on), and as the walls of Zeyad's family home in Baghdad trembled from the precision-guided aftershocks, the dental student kept putting the agile mammal through his paces.

"It was really strange," Zeyad tells me now by e-mail. "But it was better than having to listen to the bombings." So he played it with the volume blasting. In his hands, Bandicoot died and was reborn, then died again. Meanwhile, outside, airstrikes kept ripping the sky. And so, as he recently wrote of "Crash Bandicoot" on his blog Healing Iraq, "I experience d`já vu whenever I play it now."

While millions of gamers have their own associations with the game, Zeyad is surely among the first to couple "Crash" to a massive military campaign. But he's likely not the only one -- during the invasion of Iraq, reporters observed American soldiers hunched in the steel wombs of Bradleys and M1s, engrossed in their own portable game consoles, as they rumbled by night toward Zeyad's hometown.

The invasion has been a boon to the country's high-tech consumer market, according to Zeyad. "After the war," he says, "computer and console prices dropped drastically and became available for a larger section of Iraqis. You can get the fastest Pentium IV PC with the best components and accessories at $500, whereas it usually cost $800 before the war ... As to consoles, the cheapest are the Dreamcast at around $80 (or less) and the Playstation at an average of $100. Playstation 2's are more expensive and therefore less common (around $200-$250)."

That the PS2 is openly sold at all is actually another benefit of the war's aftermath, for under U.N. sanctions, units of the Sony console were apparently classified "dual use" devices which Saddam's scientists might bundle up to create a supercomputer, for use in long-range missile guidance. But Zeyad says the PS2 was still available under the dictator's regime, despite that interdiction: "They were smuggled through Jordan and Turkey. Most of these came from Southeast Asia and the United Arab Emirates."

Despite postwar price drops, he continues, "Computers and consoles are not affordable for the majority of Iraqis, and that is why there are so many Internet, LAN, and console cafes opening all over Iraq for people who can't afford them." For as he recently wrote on Healing Iraq, "Iraqis are hardcore gamers. Almost every neighborhood in Baghdad has what you might call a 'videogame cafe' with several consoles where people can play for about a dollar an hour ... . We have a special gamers' district at Bab Al-Sharj at the heart of the city, where you can find hundreds of videogame vendors." (Maybe that's where Hans Blix should have sent his weapon inspectors, since they could have verified evidence of dual use violations by digging up copies of "Grand Theft Auto III.")

Zeyad describes a Baghdad that few in the West know -- certainly not from reports that seem only to depict a Third World city beset on all sides by anarchy, ethnic and religious conflict, and terrorist attack. When the world media reports on Iraqi anger over the Coalition Provisional Authority's failure to restore the electric grid, for example, little is written about what Iraqis are using the power for. There is a difference between reporting that Iraqis are angry at a neighborhood power outage and reporting, say, that a lot of them are irked because the blackout interrupted a killer session of "Counter Strike" at their local LAN cafe.

So Zeyad's insights into his country's burgeoning digital culture provide a missing piece in the American dialog on Iraq's reconstruction, and Iraqis' own perception of Americans. And in his account of that subculture -- and by his own efforts as a wired blogger -- one perceives an Iraq that is ready and essentially equipped, despite temporary appearances, to join the interconnected tapestry of modern democracy.

Zeyad (he prefers not to publicize his family name) was born in Baghdad in 1979, and as a boy he moved to the West for a time with his Sunni parents (though Zeyad describes himself as atheist). They pursued graduate degrees in England, and voluntarily returned in 1987 to Saddam's Iraq.

"My parents weren't planning to stay in the U.K.," he tells me. "They were there for study on the [Iraqi] government's expense and they still had jobs back in Baghdad. Moreover, the situation in Iraq during the '80s wasn't so bad as compared to the '90s." (At the time, Saddam was still seen by many as a harsh but relatively progressive autocrat -- certainly compared to the hostage-taking mullahs in Iran he was then waging war against.)

Zeyad's family had a P.C., and computer games became both a hobby and a cross-cultural conduit out of a rapidly closing society. "When I was 11 or 12," he says, "I started playing Sierra adventure games. I was a huge fan of 'Leisure Suit Larry' and 'Police Quest.' I learned a lot about American culture from these games, and I started to understand some American expressions and their usage of the English language. These games were very educational to me."

(In "Police Quest: In Pursuit Of The Death Angel", you're a by-the-book cop who must track down a powerful drug dealer, and in "Leisure Suit Larry: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards," you're a virginal would-be swinger who must sex up three EGA babes with '80s hair. (So as an education in Americana, perfect.)

rolleyes: - sr )

Then came the first Gulf War, and suddenly Iraq itself became a setting for U.S.-made P.C. games. "There was a game called 'F-15 Flight Simulator' which was about the first Gulf War," says Zeyad. "I spent a lot of time playing that game and specifically missions in Iraq."

Saddam's security apparatus eventually took notice of games like this as well. "At one time we even had Mukhabarat agents rummaging through gaming stores looking for these games. As far as I know, when someone brought a military game from Jordan, it would have to stay for a few days at the Ministry of Information for checking. When we were still playing 'Mortal Kombat' on the Sega Megadrive, we heard rumors that there was a specific code or combo that would spawn Saddam Hussein and his bodyguards to finish the opponent, but these were just rumors."

The Mukhabarat created what must be the strangest assignment in the history of secret police, anywhere.

"They had people," says Zeyad, "whose jobs were to play and finish these games to find out if there was any mention of Iraq or Saddam."

In other words, they employed totalitarian play testers.

When the country went online in the late '90s, all Internet traffic was monitored by the Mukhabarat, who kept a watchful eye on political dissent. But Zeyad was still able to access apparently apolitical gaming sites, and these became a kind of backdoor for a limited form of self-expression. For the last three years, "I hanged around gamefaqs.com message boards and in Yahoo groups and chatted with gamers from many countries. Normally we just discuss favorite games, ask questions about plot theories, gameplay tips, puzzle solutions and similar stuff."

But as rumors of war loomed, conversations shifted away from virtual combat to the real, imminent thing. "We had some discussions about the war," says Zeyad. "Many people expressed incredulity or astonishment to the fact that Iraqis played P.C. or console games, or had access to the Internet. They used to ask me many embarrassing questions about the situation or about the regime, which I was a bit hesitant to respond to, given the fact that all Internet use in Iraq was under surveillance by the Mukhabarat. At one point I stopped participating in these discussions altogether, just to avoid the trouble." (A true Iraqi patriot would have understood that the Mukhabarat monitored internet use to protect Iraq's freedom. - sr)

Last year, he returned to the global discourse on his country in a big way, when he joined a second wave of Iraqi bloggers. They were following the path laid by Salam Pax, the original "Baghdad blogger" who has since leveraged his notoriety into a book deal and a U.K. Guardian column. Inspired and then assisted by New York blogger Jeff Jarvis, Zeyad's Healing Iraq blog went online shortly after the debut of Baghdad Burning, the acerbically pessimistic blog from Riverbend (who didn't even seem very happy to see Saddam captured).

In the main, though, the Iraqi bloggers tend to be tentatively optimistic advocates of the U.S.-led invasion and the Coalition Provisional Authority. Omar's Iraq the Model (with contributions from Ali and Mohammed) shines with blistering takedowns of the Western antiwar movement, while the dignified ruminations by Alaa of The Mesopotamian are interspersed by florid bursts of Arabic-tinged prose. ("The bones in the mass graves salute you, Avenger of the Bones," wrote Alaa, greeting Bush after his brief Thanksgiving visit. "Hail, Friend and Ally, Hail, Sheikh of Sheikhs, GWB; Descendant of the Noble Ancient Celt.")

But then there is Zeyad's teenage brother Nabil, who launched his own blog last November, and even here there is something stirring, in the kid's gusto to get his opinion out to the world, Baathist holdouts or fractured English be damned. ("This man is an American man," writes Nabil, rudely dismissing Pentagon-backed CPA council member Ahmed Chalabi, "he gets out of Iraq when he was a kid and now he comes to Iraq and wants to be the president of the new Iraq, his age about 50-60, he is a thieve he steal a bank in JORDAN and the Jordanian police want him now.")

While Zeyad is also a supporter of the American-led occupation, he is not, however, occupation's apologist. In fact, his most recent entries have advocated the pleas of a relative who believes her son died after being abused by U.S. patrolmen, a claim hotly disputed in the blog's forum by his mostly American readers. (Zeyad sought assistance for an investigation into these allegations by contacting "Chief Wiggles," another Iraq-based blogger -- who also happens to be an American Army intelligence officer and a freelance humanitarian. It may be the first instance in which blogging has aided a wartime misconduct claim.)

To his own surprise, Zeyad's ambivalence on the occupation extended even to Saddam's capture. "I felt humiliated," he wrote. "I sank into an overwhelming depression and sadness, and I had a desperate need to get terribly drunk. I should have felt joy but I didn't. And I'm still disappointed with myself." (His brother Nabil was a lot less ambivalent: "Mr. Poll Bremer goes on TV and he said we got him," he posted. "What a great thing the American forces arrest Saddam in a spider hole that he was hidden in, he is so loser because of why he didn't kill him self when he heard the soldiers near him.")

Zeyad's forthright reflections on contemporary Iraqi politics have earned him an international following, but his accounts of the Baghdad gaming scene have perhaps garnered him about as much attention. "I should have made this a gaming blog instead of a political one!" he wrote, after his first entry on the topic was swamped by reader response. Both it and his photo log of game cafes were linked to by Slashdot.org (the ultimate URL in techie cachet) and thus disseminated throughout the global geek consortium.

None of this should come as a surprise. Computer and video games are the universal cultural referent for the young, in a way that Hollywood films were the catalyst of an earlier generation, as soldiers greeted each other across the battle lines. Nabil employs them as an icebreaker when talking with U.S. soldiers he meets (and sometimes plays basketball with): "At first the Americans were shocked to know that Iraqis had access to games and consoles and knew so much about it," says Zeyad, "but after a while they started to discuss game strategies, exchange tips and so [on]."

The kind of games they talk about may also provide insight into the way this new generation perceives Americans. Among the most popular titles in Iraq is 2002's "Medal of Honor: Allied Assault."

"It's a very popular game here," says Zeyad. "Iraqi gamers love first-person shooter games, and this one was a hit for some time and is still being played at LAN cafes." A painstakingly realistic depiction of the American GI during World War II, its key level is a brutal re-creation of the D-Day assault on Omaha Beach, based on the same scene from "Saving Private Ryan." As in "Ryan," the level is so punishing (you must die dozens of times to even reach the beachhead) it almost plays like a simulated self-flagellator, which you endure as a way of honoring the resolve of America's soldiers, even in the face of grinding death.

"I'm not really sure if the game story itself had any effect on opinion [of Americans]," Zeyad says. "Since most Iraqi gamers don't really pay much attention to plot or story line, and usually focus on gameplay." Still, in the game's Allied vs. Axis multiplayer mode, he says, "most of the gamers I notice play as Allied." And you have to think something so vivid would work its way into the subconscious of the Iraqis who play it. (Then again, another hit game with Iraqis is the P.C. game adaptation of "Black Hawk Down.")

Zeyad also sees gaming potential in a more recent American conflict -- or rather, the one that is still playing out. "I think the operations in Iraq deserve their own game," he says. "I would like the game to be accurate and represent the existing terrain and conditions in Iraq. Other games like 'Conflict: Desert Storm' are poor in this area, for example, the terrain and buildings don't look the same as the real thing, and the voice acting was terrible -- the Iraqi soldiers talked in an Egyptian accent. Also, the player should be able to choose either side, for example a Republican Guard soldier, or a foreign terrorist, in addition to coalition soldiers."

But more than the theme of any particular title, it's the pervasiveness of gaming itself, even well before Saddam's fall, that strikes one as the most telling pointer of the country's future.

Gamers know the digital age in their body. They grasp a game's farrago of diverse stimuli, the onscreen rush of icons, meters, text, 3D visuals and audio cues, and make a cascade of split-second decisions that become, after a time, second nature, like a limbic response. Interfaces are intuitively understood, complex systems are quickly comprehended without the need of predigested orientation. For gamers, understanding other computer applications (the Internet, digital cameras, etc.) becomes a trivial effort, and this is where the growing constellation of game cafes throughout the cities of Iraq becomes so crucial. If computer literacy is a prerequisite for reaching the height of globally connected pluralism (and it is) then consoles are the stepladder, and PC games, the escalator.

For now, though, Iraqis as gamers are still trapped behind disconnected borders. "LAN cafes don't have Internet connections," says Zeyad. "Internet cafes don't allow software and games to be installed on their computers." But when the connection comes, he'll enter the lobbies of the world's multiplayer combat zones. "I'm looking forward to play mainly 'Unreal Tournament' and 'Empire Earth,' but it would be fun to try other games like 'Battlefield 1942,' 'Quake III,' 'Medal of Honor,' and 'Counter Strike.'"

I sometimes play the odd Unreal Tournament match online myself, and so I tell Zeyad to look for a player with the username "Coriolanus," when he can come on via the Internet.

"At local LAN cafes," Zeyad e-mails me, "I go by the handle 'Soul Reaper,' so I think I'll use the same."

Inshallah, the Soul Reaper will hunt down Coriolanus with a rocket launcher, and kill him again and again, as a way of announcing Iraq's arrival to the free world at play.

In my work as a journalist of the medium, I interviewed a fellow gamer who is also a Green Beret who once called down airstrikes on the Taliban in Kandahar. For an entirely unrelated assignment, a year later, I happened to meet another fellow gamer who is also an Air Force bomber pilot, and it turned out he unleashed some of those very bombs on Kandahar's Taliban -- and then last year, dropped more munitions on Saddam's forces in Iraq. That pilot flies an F15e -- the same jet that Zeyad of Iraq is more than familiar with, from his days of playing the Gulf War-era flight simulator of the same name. (Though Zeyad was more preoccupied with controlling Crash Bandicoot, when the real F15s returned over his family's house last year.) As a gamer, I have myself played with peers living throughout the E.U., from Japan, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia. (Unsurprisingly, given the prominence of its high-tech economy, Israel is the only Middle Eastern country with a sizable gaming community; but that, it seems, will change soon.)

The brotherhood of gamers crosses all borders, ignores all cultural, political and economic distinctions, and brings together some of the most technologically savvy of every nation into the same creative commons.

I think about the play-testers of the Mukhabarat, the men who once had to play through video games in search of potential anti-regime content. (In "Conflict: Desert Storm", for example, the end mission involves killing a general who looks suspiciously like the recently de-spider-holed leader.) I picture a middle-aged Baathist with a Playstation controller teetering on a voluminous gut, trying without success to maneuver his British commando into Saddam's lair before the Republican Guard can get a bead on him. Instead he's the one who keeps getting mercilessly snuffed. Maybe before this he manned Qusay's plastic shredders, or worked shifts at what his résumé tactfully describes as "despoiler of women's virtue." Now here he is, fumbling with a medium where cruelty counts for nothing, and the game kids of the Bab al-Sharj can own his ass with their eyes closed. (Down the halls of the Ministry of Information, he bellows, "How do I use this 'God mode'?!") Because he can't beat the game fairly, because it demands a proficiency he could never earn, and there are no means with which to torture its hard-edged causal logic into submission. In the very near future, he will be dead, or retired to the indignity of hawking diesel fuel to passing farmers and truckers outside town.

But even in the electrified neighborhoods of the Sunni Triangle, the game kids will be busy inside, applying their skills. And they will be in the game rooms and the Internet cafes springing up with just as much frequency, opening up new avenues of possibility. We will benefit from them as well, for in between death-match sessions, some of them will let us in on the news of an emerging Iraq that our own media cannot be troubled to keep pace with -- clicking through to new windows of opportunity which open up slowly, but with progress meters that steadily move in the right direction.

 

[Guest]

re. Gamer of Baghdad

Thanks, ella. I doubt there's a gamer in the states with the nick of Coriolanus <sigh>

Perdita

 

[BlackSnake]

Here is a short excert I found that may shed some light on Iraq's Democratic future. The full article can be found here

Iraq's Route To A Democratic Future

By Adnan Pachachi

(Adnan Pachachi is a former Iraqi foreign minister, deposed by Saddam Hussein in 1968.)

Post-conflict Iraq, rather than the conflict itself, has become the focus of global attention. Two options dominate current thinking: US military rule, or a government in exile. Both are flawed and counter-productive. The former is oblivious to a vibrant Iraqi nationalism; the latter ignores the aspirations of massive anti-Ba'athist forces inside the country.

This is the reason I have rejected offers to take a leading part in the arrangements for the post-Saddam era. Last week, Jalal Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, invited me to join the leadership of the Iraqi opposition. I declined for three reasons. First, I have serious doubts about the legitimacy of such a group or its representative nature. Second, any body formed by such a group would have only advisory responsibilities during the transitional period, not executive ones. Serving as an advisory body attached to a US military administration would be damaging and unacceptable. Third, I have reservations about the group's structure and membership. Hence my surprise to learn on Friday that I had been elected to the six-man leadership committee. This is a portent of how selection may go through without due process of information and consultation.

...

 

[Icingsugar]

If you look at the electoral map of the U.S. in the last election I think it is pretty apparent why we don't go with a direct democracy. The seaboard states, due to their massive urban centers would set policy for the whole of the country. The founding fathers feared direct democracy because it highly resembles mob rule. I for one am pretty comfortable with repreenative democracy. I could spend a few hours bitching about the failures of the two party system, especially recently, but it isn't any better or worse than a multi-party system probably.

-Colly

You know, you could actually have it both ways. If the stucture looked more like the EU parlament (which is a travesty in many other ways, but when it somes to regional representation, they have a healthy mix IMO.) Each country has a number of chairs, those are divided via national elections. I'm not sure if all nations use the same method for this, but most chairs in the parlament is therefore filld via a regional representation, but still with much more political diversity.

The parlamentarians (is that the right word?) then seems to team up just as much, if not more, with their ideological partners in Europe, as with their regional ones.

 

[minsue]

A valiant effort

Some of us however gained more faith in a represenative system in 2000

-Colly

Well, at least I tried...

I have never agreed with the representative system, but before 2000 it was more of an ideological objection. Arguing against it was more like mental masturbation than anything else. Now, needless to say, I'm vehemently opposed to it.

Who cares where most of the people live? If the majority elects a president, it doesn't matter if the majority are all east of the Mississippi or north of the Mason/Dixon line or in Alaska as long as they are all American citizens. We have the House & Senate for regional representation. The presidency should be democratic.

- Mindy, off for a drink with Perdita

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Well, at least I tried...

I have never agreed with the representative system, but before 2000 it was more of an ideological objection. Arguing against it was more like mental masturbation than anything else. Now, needless to say, I'm vehemently opposed to it.

Who cares where most of the people live? If the majority elects a president, it doesn't matter if the majority are all east of the Mississippi or north of the Mason/Dixon line or in Alaska as long as they are all American citizens. We have the House & Senate for regional representation. The presidency should be democratic.

- Mindy, off for a drink with Perdita

Thats a very easy position to take. You are a liberal and if it were that way we wouldn't need an election, you could just pick the democrat you wanted to lead every four years. If you look you will see Gore carried practically no states except the seaboards.

By that plan no Republican would ever win. I on the other hand would prefer that the democratic primarys not appoint a president by fiat.

-Colly

 

[minsue]

Thats a very easy position to take. You are a liberal and if it were that way we wouldn't need an election, you could just pick the democrat you wanted to lead every four years. If you look you will see Gore carried practically no states except the seaboards.

By that plan no Republican would ever win. I on the other hand would prefer that the democratic primarys not appoint a president by fiat.

-Colly

I would feel the same regardless of how the majority of the country voted. Look at what you're saying Colly. Essentially, you are saying we shouldn't have a direct democracy because, if we did, the party that the majority voted for would win. I don't think the presidency of the United States should be about playing nice and making sure both sides get a chance.

Not to mention the fact that I don't think you are correct in saying the liberal candidate would always win. Most people couldn't care less about politics and only pay enough attention to provide a backlash against whichever party is currently in office.

I still stand by my opinion that it doesn't matter where the majority of the population live. It only matters how the majority of the population votes.

- Mindy

 

[Guest]

It only matters how the majority of the population votes.

Being a member of the "new" majority, I'm with Mindicita. Tequila, Min?

Perdita

 

[deliciously_naughty]

hey min and per...room for me to sip a cosmo next to you at the bar?

I'm still laughing over the concept of "appointing a democratic government"...that's beautifully contradictory. By definition, a democratic government is voted into office by the people of that country (or the state that your brother is governor of just "happens" to have all sorts of electoral problems resulting in them deciding to vote for....gasp...YOU).

An Iraqi government appointed by the American government would be what is known as a "puppet government." In other words, we'd be pulling the strings.

The 2000 election should have caused rioting in the streets...the people were fooled by a lying former cokehead.


Hey W...I've got a few questions and an observation for you...So where are those WMD? The one's you swore under oath that you knew existed and had proof that existed? You know, it's funny...you should thank your lucky stars that you're not getting impeached...by comparison I think that lying about a reason for going to war is a much bigger "fuck you" to your constituents than lying about who you're fucking.

Too bad congress doesn't have the balls to impeach him

 

[sweetnpetite]

IN regards to 'appointing a domacracy'

They (Iraq) are not the US. they do not need the same kind of democracy (if any) as the US. They are loyal to tribes- not to country. There way of life is completely different. They CAN'T have democracy or representational government unless they want it and they set it up themselves.

I disagree about the living in caves part. They are not all living in caves - they are not all idiots. they are not children. We really need to stop treating them like they are a third grade class whom we need to show them, "Ok, this is how you set up a domocracy (the only Godly form of Government on the face of the earth.)"

After we get done telling them how to govern themselves correctly, are we also going to show them the proper way to worship?

If we are going to force them to do things the way *we* do them, we might as well just annex them and keep them as pets. At least that would be honest.

A government "of the people for the people and by the people" must come *from* the people.

 

[lucky-E-leven]

I would feel the same regardless of how the majority of the country voted. Look at what you're saying Colly. Essentially, you are saying we shouldn't have a direct democracy because, if we did, the party that the majority voted for would win. I don't think the presidency of the United States should be about playing nice and making sure both sides get a chance.

Not to mention the fact that I don't think you are correct in saying the liberal candidate would always win. Most people couldn't care less about politics and only pay enough attention to provide a backlash against whichever party is currently in office.

I still stand by my opinion that it doesn't matter where the majority of the population live. It only matters how the majority of the population votes.

- Mindy

It is a very pretty idea, I agree, but without representation we (every legal voter *dead or alive in florida* would be responsible for weighing in on every single issue up for vote and I for one don't have enough knowledge of all issues or the time to master that knowledge. Nor do I believe enough people with the good sense to make those decisions have it either.

I think the shitty thing about elections (and it's no one's fault but their own) is that there is such a large part of the country that doesn't even bother to vote. I think the problem is not so much in the design of the system, but how we fail to utilize it to our benefit. Majority can't speak if majority doesn't vote and it seems as though the majority (barring the election fiasco that has driven you to drink tonight) that is voting has been heard soundly for the last several elections before it.

I do not say these things lightly, either, as I am a resident of TX and our state gvmt. is currently trying to redraw all districts (majority in power is rep.) so that they might gain even more chairs in next round of voting. Redistricting was done not even two years ago and is not scheduled again for quite some time, but that is not stopping our fantastic gov. rick perry, who gallantly stepped in from Lt. Gov. position when G.W.B. hauled ass for Washington, from calling 3 special sessions back to back (raping my pocket book) in order to get it done. (This is where No Child Left Behind, does not count in TX because we are really busy spending $$$ on special sessions we do not need so that there may be a republican heiney in every seat.)

But you'd be so proud, Minsue! Our Dems fled the state twice to avoid the first two sessions and halt the redist. effort! I really got off on it simply because it's been a long time since I've seen something bold done for such a good cause. They were ultimately unsuccessful and I believe the whole fiasco is moving up through circuit courts as we speak, but I will say no more to embarrass my beloved home state (even though it does not have a good history for cranking out presidents) Anyway, I know the balance seems tilted at this point, but am not so sure the direct democracy is the answer...

E- humbly venting