Not About Parrots

With all of the spin that has surrounded the upcoming election, I'd be incredibly surprised if anyone is really informed anymore. Now is the perfect time to take a step back, outside this well-established swing state, even as far out as, say, Europe! The most refreshing point of view I've read in the past couple of weeks came from a surprising source: John Cleese.

In his posting, Cleese quotes Anatole Kaletsky's excellent article about democracy in yesterday's London Times. An excerpt:

The primary function of democracy is not to elect good leaders, since nobody can predict in advance how a politician will perform. It is to eject leaders who have manifestly failed. The ability to remove leaders who turn out to be corrupt, dangerous, outrageously dishonest or manifestly incompetent is the primary privilege and duty of any democracy. And if any leader in our lifetime deserved to be ejected by voters, regardless of their ideology or political persuasion, it is surely President Bush.

Also, one more observation regarding spin: The RNC is all about the negative ads now. Our television has been bombarded with images of wolves (representing the terrorists -- remember when monkey-boy couldn't stop calling them "the evildoers"? Ah, memories...), overinflated tallies of "misguided" votes on the Senate floor, and out-of-context quotes (the completely misunderstood "global test," terrorism as "a nuisance," and so on). Their only recent "warm-and-fuzzy" ad is some dripping chronicle of a young girl who got a hug from Bush and cried. By contrast, a couple of the mail ads we've recently gotten from the DNC and their latest commercial all have a positive, pro-Kerry message, featuring Kerry himself respectfully asking for our vote. Not that he hasn't attacked Bush, mind you, but considering how much he has to work with, I can't help but consider this taking the high road!

Quote of the Day from yesterday:

"We have the terrorists on the run...."

Um... yeah. Osama was on my television again last night. Nice work, monkey-boy.