Democracy

Considering that they have launched two wars at least partly to introduce democracy to the Middle East, the Bush Administration seem to hold it in fairly low regard here in the United States. Abroad, democracy is something worth killing and dying for; at home, it's something nice to have around, a cute little cultural feature, but sort of quaint and definitely not necessary, like cobblestone streets or a good local marmalade.

George W Bush's indifference to democracy became manifest during the 2000 elections, when attorneys acting on his behalf successfully lobbied on his behalf to have vote-counting in Florida permanently suspended in order to cal the election in favor of their client. The election debacle is often described as a bit of a snake pit which both parties tried to settle in the courts; but it should not be forgotten that Democratic lawsuits were meant to continue counting the votes until the actual winner could be determined, a position that seems far more in line with notions of democracy than the Republic position, which boiled down to "let's call off this whole charade; just let us win, already". Happily for Bush, his view -- that he should be President of the United States -- was shared, if not by the majority of regular voters, or even the majority of electoral voters, at least by the majority of Supreme Court justices.

Katherine Harris, then the Florida secretary of state (and previously the Bush campaign chairwoman in Florida), demonstrated a similarly cold-fish commitment to the will of the people. In the Florida Supreme Court's decision, she claimed that enforcing a completely arbitrary polling deadline was paramount to figuring out who actually won: "I do not believe," she wrote, "the possibility of affecting the outcome of the election is enough to justify ignoring a statutory deadline."

The man who benefited from this faux-democracy (and a near-repeat in the 2004 election, about which there are still numerous unanswered questions] soon vowed to be "the President of everybody", even the majority of people who voted for the other guy. His commitment to kinda-democracy for everyone was sorely tested after the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001, when his plan to attack several countries not involved in the attacks neccessitated cozying up to several leaders whose love of semi-democracy was not as great as his own, such as Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov and Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf. And while the President's enthusiasm for democratic reform in Iraq (where we recently fought a war so that the people there could vote on a Constitution written by Americans that less than 10% of them had read), Afghanistan and North Korea is legendary, his party has resisted voter reform at home, continues a friendly relationship with the genocidal government of Indonesia, and does more trade with China than with any other nation -- presumably under the principle that democracy has its price, and if the price is giving up cheap DVD players and light-up Garfield sneakers made by slave labor, it is too high.

At a time when Americans of all political persuasions are understandably concerned that their government has come out in favor of torture, wiretapping, indefinite detention without trial, and racial profiling, the President puts no minds at ease when he says things like "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPrint.asp?Page=\Politics\archive\200011\POL20001121e.html

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0012/18/nd.01.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12450-2005Jan15_2.html