Do We Really Want Democracy?

Michael Koppelman

This election season is just hilarious. Both sides are constantly accusing the other side of being undemocratic. Both sides are doing childish things like stealing lawn signs. Both sides are constantly slandering the other side. Both sides are arming their lawyers to fight over the results. Both sides are trying to get their people to vote and stop the other side’s people from voting. Look, folks, if we really all agree that we want a democracy we should lose these constant double-standards. I really believe that most people would rather have their candidate win unfairly than have the other guy win fairly. That is undemocratic. Silencing people’s opinions is undemocratic. Constantly assuming that the other side is cheating is undemocratic. Treating the other side as if they are unpatriotic is undemocratic. In this way Ann Coulter and Michael Moore are equally guilty. Now let’s hear from one right-winger with balls that agrees with this! Let’s stop hating each other over this shit.

Do We Really Want Democracy?

5 thoughts on “Do We Really Want Democracy?”

  2. micadelic says:

    I thought that Bush had an opportunity to really put Kerry away before the first debate. At the time, he was really gaining in the polls (albeit largely as a result of the swift boat vets) and I think a good debate performance could have salted it for him. Then, I watched the debate and I was so disappointed with the performance of the president. I thought he looked foolish and ill-prepared. A deer in the headlights. Then, being the political junkie that I am, I started to watch the spin doctoring on both sides and I thought to myself, why even ask Katherine Hughes how Bush did, you know what her answer will be. She would say he won the debate even if he walked out in a monkey suit and drooled all over the podium. The same with Joe Lockhart, what news value is there in even asking him who he thought won? Is he gonna come out and say, “Yeah, my guy was really off his game tonight and the president really schooled him.” It’s not gonna happen. When my liberal friends asked me how I thought “my guy” did in that first debate I had to say that I thought Kerry mopped the stage with him.
    I hope that Michael K. is wrong when he says it will become patriotic to criticize the C-I-C. Also as a result of my military upbringing, I was taught to respect and support the president whether you agreed with him or not. Not that you can’t disagree, but calling the president “incompetent” or “brain dead” or saying that he “lied to the American people” for me is way over the line. I will never say things like that about Kerry, especially in a time of war, even if I believe it to be true. Please don’t give me the “good German” argument here. There has to be some respect and allegiance to the chain of command or the whole freakin’ thing will just fall apart and what we’ll end up with is anarchy. Don’t get me wrong though, sometimes I feel our system is so broken that anarchy may be the only way to fix it. Tear it all down and start over! I just don’t think it’s gotten to the point yet where it’s unsalvageable.
    Hopefully you will all see that I am not a partisan either but I am a patriot. The people of this country need to put the truth first and we need to start finding ways to get better candidates elected. Michael K. mentioned John McCain, I think if John McCain could have ran in this race he would have won in a landslide. It seems to me that he is the liberal’s favorite Republican and he would have gotten immense bi-lateral support. Maybe he will still be around in ‘08. I heard a funny line today that said, “If God would have wanted us to vote, he’d have given us real candidates.”
    I know I tend to blather on but I want to make one point about why, in my view, we can’t get decent, middle-ground type candidates into the Presidential race. I think the fault lies in the primary system. Basically it is impossible for a middle-of-the-road type candidate to get through it because the primary system is driven by the hard-core “base” of each party so the candidates that come out of the primary system tend to be more representative of the far left or far right instead of representing the elusive “middle-America” who by and large, are not involved in the primary system. You see examples of this in the state endorsement process, often times a candidate will be endorsed by the DFL or the IR party but get trounced in the General Election by a DFL or IR candidate that was not the endorsed candidate.

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  3. Great comments by chad and micadelic. It’s funny because I like John McCain and I know a lot of (what I call) right-wingers who like John McCain. What I like about him is he is willing to be non-partisan. After the debates I heard him say that he thought Kerry did well. You would never hear Mary Matalin or Ann Coulter say Kerry did well, no matter how well he did. They are blinded to the facts. I thought Bush did pretty good the second and third debates. (He was horrible in the first debate.) McCain was also willing to say that the Swift Boat Vet ads were horrible. I really respect that he is willing to be rational in the face of partisanship.

    If Kerry wins we are going to see the double-standards fly like crazy. All of a sudden it will be very patriotic, in the eyes of the Right, to criticize the Commander-in-Chief. The liberals will all be crying about how we should all support Kerry in a time of war. If this election is close we’ll find both side taking the opposite side they took in 2000 if it furthers their aims.

    So while I am a raging liberal, I am not a partisan. I do not believe in double-standards. I think the truth should come before ideology. For example, Bush thinks tax cuts helps the economy. We should be able to look and say, yes they did help or no they did not help. If they did not help we have to take that ideology off the table. If they did, we should learn something from that too.

    If we all put democracy first, put the truth first, but reasonable and rational discourse first, we can get our country back from the hands of the freaks who put partisanship first.

    Michael

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  4. micadelic says:

    I don’t know if I qualify as a right-winger as I find myself loathe to identify whole-heartedly with either side. My vote will probably go to Mr. Bush so maybe that in itself will qualify me as such in this forum and lolife, I agree with you 100%.

    I can’t stand to listen to Sean Hannity as much as I can’t stand to listen to Michael Moore. I consider both to be so blinded by ideology that everything they say has absolutely no real value or weight in an intelligent debate. And where is the intelligent debate?

    When I hear the candidates on both sides taking comments from their opponent’s stump speeches out of context and repeating it ad nauseum to make some idiotic point, It makes me want to not vote for either of them. If I hear Bush say “global test” or Kerry say “Bush isn’t concerned about UBL” one more time I’m going to slit my wrists. It’s so infuriating that I’ve come to the conclusion that the only people that could possibly be swayed by such rhetoric are really stupid people. So to me, it comes down to both candidates are now just campaigning for the benefit of the very dense!

    I fear for this democracy (or republic, actually) and I think that this inability to have a reasonable discussion does not bode well for us as a society. When a conservative says that John Kerry is a godless baby-killer and a liberal calls George Bush a religious fanatic, both are wrong. I believe both men to be honorable men who want to serve their country. Is Bush religious, yes, does Kerry support abortion rights, yes. To extrapolate those two facts to the extreme hinders any chance of actual debate.

    Why can’t we have a debate about what actually is the best way to spur an economy, cutting taxes or government regulations? Why can’t we discuss what role the government should have in a women’s right to choose? My view, none, sorry, not very right-wing! Why can’t we talk reasonably about the war in Iraq? It is my view that reasonable, intelligent minds can have different opinions on all of these issues and that neither side is absolutely right or absolutely wrong. I, for example, am willing to believe that my support of the president may be misplaced but I am not convinced that it is. I would also like people who don’t agree with me to have the humility to entertain the notion that, while they don’t agree with the war, that maybe, just maybe, history will prove that Bush did the right thing.

    Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe it’s the preponderance of arrogance and the lack of humility that has brought us to this place.

    ——————————————
    One more thing … we all see the world through our own filters. My filter happens to be one of a kid who was raised by a father who was a 23 year veteran of the US Air Force. I grew on Air Bases from Japan to Virginia and many place in between. My father was actually stationed at the Pentagon for a time. So while I don’t see dissent as unpatriotic, it is my leaning to give the government the benefit of the doubt. I can also understand that someone raised in a different environment, say by a parent who was a university professor or an attorney, or someone who was raised in an underprivileged environment may have a much, much different world view. I honor and respect that and understand that we don’t have to agree, but we do have to get along.

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