Thursday, October 28, 2004

I got into it with a couple people at lunch about the merits of the electoral college. Both of them think it’s outdated and that we should just have a straight popular vote. I’m afraid I lost it a little bit and went into full rant mode about why we need the electoral college system and the genius of it. Really, the Founding Fathers were some special men. They came up with a form of representative democratic government that has stood the test of 200+ years and works so incredibly well.

The other thing that smoked me was that one of these jokers started saying something to the effect that “we had a lot of gall trying to tell Afghanistan what’s wrong with their electoral process when our own is so screwed up.” I need to apologize to that person for my tone, but I shot right back by pointing out that we did not tell Afghanistan what’s wrong with their system. On the contrary, they asked us for assistance since they had never had a democratic election before and didn’t know what to do. So we and the Brits and some others showed them the way to do it, properly and fairly.

But, but, but...the disputes! the accusations of fraud! Puh-leez. The disputes by the candidates were dropped. The accusations of fraud were proved invalid. And today, Afghanistan has their first freely elected President.

HELLO!?!?! They held their first ever elections in Afghanistan! Women voted. There were no terrorist attacks as had been threatened. People protested and weren’t killed because of it! I’m astounded by Americans who don’t get how monumental this all is. They’re so short-sighted. It’s disheartening.

LATER: OK, I just called to apologize to the one person and they started to lecture me. Yeah, no need for the lecture - I called to apologize, remember? Sheesh.

I’m a wee bit cranky today - fatigue and stress are setting in, methinks.