Wither Democracy?

OK, I am probably out of my depth here and running the risk of Google Blog searches sending many unwanted viewers to my sleepy little Blog, but I may as well spout off anyway. This post is about the naïve view of democracy as practiced and shoved at the world by the Bush Administration and others who have turned into political pushers of this drug of majority rule.

The most recent evidence that democracy isn’t for everyone just occurred in Pakistan – or nuclear-armed Pakistan, as the media prefers. Of course we all know about the recent assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Her reason for coming out of exile was due to a grand plan hatched by Condoleezza Rice and the President that was supposed to put a power sharing arrangement in place with Pakistan’s current president, Pervez Musharraf who arrived as president in the decidedly non-democratic manner of leading a military coup and naming himself the leader of the government.

Of course this is where things get dicey because Musharraf is an enemy or our enemy (Al-Qaida) and, as a leader of a huge military, he is seen as something of a stopgap of growth of the terror group. Although he has not been altogether as successful as we would like, he does just enough to keep Washington’s billions headed his way. His willingness to hold elections gained him even more support.

Enter former Prime Minister Bhutto, who became a “former prime minister” after being sent into exile on corruption charges, leaving a mostly hostile country behind but not without at least $20 million to avoid living in exile on a skimpy budget.
American and European meddling forced Musharraf to hold “free and fair” election – a wonderful catch-phrase that doesn’t even work in our own country – and he won a sizeable majority of sitting lawmakers. An independent Supreme Court in Pakistan attempted to nullify the election but Musharraf fired the court and suspended the Constitution for several weeks. It is believed Bhutto declined to run for president because of the power-sharing agreement that was being worked out between her and Musharraf and pushed principally by the U.S. Naturally any agreement put in place that appears to exclude the voters, no matter the amount of international symmetry, was bound to smell to everyday Pakistanis and they viewed it as a deal between a corrupt former prime minister working in concert with a corrupt president. Of course they were likely correct.

All this set the stage for Bhutto to make a triumphant return to Pakistan for what was supposed to be a coronation. Everything seemed to be aligned; the international press, full of press kits from huge PR firms such as the U.S.’s Burson Marsteller (you can’t have a PR firm or a press without press kits), cleaned up her image outside of Pakistan while world leaders rejoiced at their own progressiveness of backing a woman in a male-dominated culture. Someone forgot to include the one million suspects who wanted her stopped at all costs and we had what most real analysts would say was a predictable result. Not only was her murder the second attempt on her life, Musharraf too has been a target, narrowly escaping two assassination attempts, all in Rawalpindi, coincidentally, which happens to be the head of the Pakistani military apparatus. This would be the equivalent of attempting to assassinate a sitting president in the U.S. in the middle of Fort Bragg.

So we have one sacrificed at the altar of democracy and this didn’t need to happen. Bhutto shouldn’t have believed her international press clippings and should have stayed in England as a permanent opposition group, and we shouldn’t have forced democracy on a people who are neither ready for such a form of governance nor ready to be governed, for that matter. I head one Pakistani say the killing of Bhutto was the same as the Kennedy assassination. Maybe to him it was, but I don’t remember a riot breaking out in the streets after Kennedy was shot and I don’t recall 50 people being killed from the civil unrest that’s been pushed by Bhutto supporters. Pakistan, with all its tribal factions among 170 million diverse people probably needs more of a dictator than someone promising a newest pro-democracy phrase, “rule of law.”

Why is what happened in Pakistan so important, I hear you ask before giving up on this messy post? Mainly because pushing democracy on an unsuspecting people has been done before and will be done again, and our Western leadership seems to have learned nothing from it. The Lebanese were pushed into voting for new leadership and the voters gave us a power struggle between two warring terror organizations, Hezbollah and Hamas. The moderates we supported came in third. We wanted free and fair elections in Nicaragua and because of American intervention, we got Daniel Ortega back in power with only 37 percent of the vote. What we was fought with bullets in the Eighties was turned around 20 years later with ballots.

The new weapon of choice of over-the-hill lefties is democracy, not armed conflict. In the past five years, voters have elected Socialist leaders in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Mexico. These four countries make up more than 70 percent of our oil imports so we have to be nice even if we don’t like them.

In case you think this is a Bush Administration problem – and it is a big one – this happened under President Clinton too. How many remember the reason we sent the military to Haiti? Jean-Bertrand Aristide won what some say was the first democratic election, which ended the regime of the Duvalier family. Actually the younger Duvalier was, in fact, elected but immediately named himself ruler for life, a good job if you can get it. A well-armed American military re-installed Aristide who quickly lived down to most Haitian leaders, was re-elected in what is largely viewed as a Chicago-style, vote-counting scandal, only to be voted out by a former ally because he had done little to improve the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. Makes one wonder why we helped in the first place.

Clinton also decided to become indirectly involved in internal Israeli politics by sending U.S. tax dollars to his politicos James Carville and Paul Begala to make sure Ehuad Barak was voted in instead of the strong-willed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It seems Clinton couldn’t work a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians and it was having a negative impact on his Nobel Peace Prize chances so he made sure the dance cards were re-arranged. A wimpy Barak eventually made a deal with the devil with the Oslo Peace Accords which ultimately resulted in peace in our time as evidenced by the First and Second Intifada.

Clinton also let Richard Holbrooke try his hand at dictatorship in the Balkans when the spoils of bombing former allies in Serbia allowed us to dictate who held the pink slip on Bosnia, the center of ethnic cleansing from all sides. Holbrooke’s idea – with a lot of help from other idiots – took place in the drafting of the Dayton Accords which said Bosnia would be trifurcated into a Muslim area, a Serb area and a split Muslim and Croat area. Leadership would be supplied by interested Europeans in what is called the Office of the High Representative, which can remove elected leaders from office and pretty much do what he or she wants. It is the only dictatorship in Europe, but don’t ask and don’t tell on that one as nobody involved likes to admit it.

Also out of the Balkans sprang up Kosovo. A district of the former Yugoslav Republic and strongly viewed by Serbs as a historic region of greater Serbia (strong as in willing to go to war to keep it from going independent). The Western world feels sorry for the ethnic Muslim Albanians who lead this tiny region that has no economy and no ability to survive on its own, so it’s forcing independence down the throats of unhappy Serbs. This has led to other breakaway republics around the world anxiously raising their hands and saying, “me too,” despite the fact that wankers like Holbrooke insist Kosovo is not a precedent. Fortunately his involvement in any future government is not a precedent either.

Bush doesn’t have clean hands in ensuring dummies get elected either. We spent what some will admit to be $160 million (probably twice that) to elect leadership-challenged Victor Yushchenko as president merely because he was not pro-Russian. I was there and I am certain that the U.S. government and its European allies stole the election from Viktor Yanukovich, thereby splitting the nation down the middle. All Yushchenko has done since elected is name is 22-year-old son as his economic minister and head for the office around noon where he paints for four hours before returning home. Meanwhile, the country is in the tank. The democracy pushers are very good at fixing elections but fall well-short when help is needed to actually lead a country. It should be no surprise that his approval rating is at 12 percent, up from nine percent after a number of Americans came on the scene to improve his image.

When the U.S. wishes to scold countries around the world for not being democratic enough, it likes to pick on Russia and its neighbor Belarus. We all hear about the evils of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose personal approval rating is nearly four times that of President Bush. We read in self-important journals that the great former chess players Gary Kasparov has been marching to stem the rolling back of democracy in Russia and his travails are well-chronicled. What is not so well-chronicled is that when he marches, he has fewer than 1,000 supporters and it only looks like more because he marches alongside the neo-Bolsheviks who believe Putin isn’t autocratic enough.

In poor Belarus, where life is relatively safe and stable, U.S. leaders don’t like their president in Alexander Lukaschenko, who has won recent election in Castro-style with almost 90 percent of the vote (strangely American leftists don’t mind such lop-sided elections in Cuba). A New Jersey Congressman named Chris Smith got the “Belarus Democracy Act” passed, which essentially ends economic relations with the country and making them even more dependent on Russia for survival. Essentially a Congressman from a state like New Jersey has told the Belarusian people to vote out their president if they want to do business with us and become a nice puppet for future NATO expansion.

This seems like a good place to finalize the endless sham of democracy. While we do have this Belarus Democracy Act and thunderous media denunciation of President Putin, we seemed to have missed putting in place the Saudi Arabia Democracy Act or the Chinese Democracy Act or even the Azerbaijan Democracy Act. I guess if you sell us oil, give us space to put air bases and produce lead-based toys for our children, you can skip right beyond the need for democracy. And if we Americans don’t like that, we can always have a vote. I think there is one here next November. I wonder if the computer voting screens will be in place by then.

Airing Grievances

Demands were made by some kid (Agent 69) to write a Christmas post. I suppose I haven’t felt as much in the Christmas spirit as years past, so I have put it off until the actual day is almost upon us. But with our Christmas lights and ornaments in a box somewhere, I still haven’t been able to muster up enough holiday cheer – despite a gallon of eggnog – to write a post worthy of the day.

Part of my grumpiness has come from a number of irritating events that has turned me more Grinch than giving. Then it occurred to me there is another holiday that is practiced on December 23 where we get to air our grievances. What a better way to spend the holidays then to air grievances?

According to Wikipedia (which is almost always accurate unless it’s about me), the holiday of Festivus is a real holiday created by a Reader’s Digest editor who happened to have a son who became a writer for the Seinfeld Show. Hence the holiday wormed into our popular culture thanks to Frank Costanza. As invented, there really is a Festivus Pole, an “Airing of Grievances” and, following a Festivus dinner, a “Feats of Strength” involving a wrestling match between the head of the household (me, I guess) with other revelers. The last part should be fun.

But I want to focus, for the sake of the holiday, on the Airing of Grievances. Let’s begin in the bathroom. You folks with your Bluetooth headsets have got to stop your conversations upon entering the men’s room. Not only do I not want to hear you carrying on about nothing important while on the throne, I don’t want the person you’re talking to listening in on one of my private moments. In fact, I doubt they want to hear my private moments, along with the private moments of several others who went into the bathroom for its highest and best use.

Keeping in the bathroom, can we do something about the water-saving, low-flush toilets? I have a real problem with tossing a Kleenex into one and needing a plunger to get it down the drain. It’s designed to save precious water, but it ordinarily takes three flushes to complete the job. How does that save water?

In the shower the do-gooders from environmental central want you to save water with a shower nozzle that drips on you rather than cascades. It’s a real problem for me to take the nozzle off the shower head just to drill out a larger hole so I can get that luxurious shower I deserve in the morning. Sure the hot water runs out faster, but I can still get in a good 35-minute shower every morning.

Here’s another grievance: smart people who make stupid predictions, mainly those in the news media’s polling division. First we were told we wouldn’t spend as much this holiday season based on minimum-wage employees calling a few hundred people out of 300 million. This tidbit, sold as fact, made every headline in the country. The other 299 million defied the polls and went out and bought up the GI Joe and Barbie Doll as usual. Polls as news must always be correct so it was explained that while we purchased as many items, we didn’t spend as much since the prices were lower because everything is made out of lead in China. Please infer from their reporting that our economy teeters on the brink of a depression.

I heard a pundit today explain that Big Saturday (today) needed to be a big bang so the retailers wouldn’t all go out of business. However, another smart guy opined that we buyers wouldn’t purchase today because the retailers were only desperate and we’d wait until Sunday when they were panicked and then wait again on Monday until they were suicidal enough to give away a TV set with every purchase of a pack of chewing gum.

Pollsters and those who confuse the art of polling for news, is also worth complaining about on this great night of Festivus. It used to be that reporters covered elections by actually focusing on positions taken by candidates and what was good and bad in speeches they made. It’s true! I’ve read about it in books.

Today, reporters only write about which candidate is ahead in the daily polls – polls that appear to change based on a story about the polls. But polling has seemingly become too complicated for most political observers, so now they write about which candidate has the most money. As I understand it, having squeezed the most money out of special interest groups now best prepares a candidate to become president. And to think some are still stuck on the quaint notion that a president should have a certain set of what we call “positions,” “values,” and “experience.” Oh, and they must not have the last name of Clinton too, although that’s a grievance for another post.

My final grievance is referring to the season and the “holidays.” We can’t say Merry Christmas anymore for fear of offending someone who happens to celebrate something other than Christmas, such as Festivus. I tell friends to have a “happy birthday” even though most people who can hear me make this pronouncement are not having a birthday. I don’t get complaints about that unless it’s at one of those restaurants that makes the person having the birthday wear a big hat. I also have been known to say “Happy Thanksgiving” and “have a happy Independence Day” when I know full well that foreigners could be within ear shot. I don’t think this makes me insensitive to others, does it?

So, for the kid who asked for this post, I have the following politically correct plea: Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country or the only America in the Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wish.

To my friends and relatives: Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!