Three days in the hospital turned into five. But I’m mending now.
Speaking of illness, a judge in Lubbock, Texas, has supposedly justified a small tax increase in order to strengthen the local sheriff’s department. He wants to be ready if Obama gives up our sovereignty to the United Nations and the UN troops try to take control of Lubbock.
From The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted by Mike Lofgren (former Republican Congressional staff member):
“Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes—at least in the minds of its followers—all three of the GOP’s main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war.”
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/05/republicans_slouching_toward_theocracy/
It’s clear that the Democrats are often ineffective, but I‘d argue that they aren’t useless if they sometimes stop the Republicans from doing crazy things.Â
In similar fashion, Avram Burg (former speaker of the Israeli parliament) argues that religious fundamentalism is destroying Israel’s democracy:
“The winds of isolation and narrowness are blowing through Israel. Rude and arrogant power brokers, some of whom hold senior positions in government, exclude non-Jews from Israeli public spaces. Graffiti in the streets demonstrates their hidden dreams: a pure Israel with ‘no Arabs’ and ‘no gentiles’. They do not notice what their exclusionary ideas are doing to Israel, to Judaism and to Jews in the diaspora. In the absence of a binding constitution, Israel has no real protection for its minorities or for their freedom of worship and expression.
If this trend continues, all vestiges of democracy will one day disappear, and Israel will become just another Middle Eastern theocracy. It will not be possible to define Israel as a democracy when a Jewish minority rules over a Palestinian majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — controlling millions of people without political rights or basic legal standing.”
From Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt:
“Mass democracy in an age of mass media means that on the one hand, you can reveal very quickly that Bush stole the 2000 election, but on the other hand, much of the population doesn’t care.”
Or agree. And thinks it was all for the best.
Judt argues that it would have been more difficult for the Republicans to steal the election in an era of limited suffrage, because the people eligible to participate in the election would have cared more about the outcome. He doesn’t think that this is an argument for limited democracy, but rather for democracy in which the rule of law and the separation of powers have key roles.
All of which we had in 2000, of course. Even in a mass democracy, an individual or a small group (like the Congress or Supreme Court) almost always get to decide. The nine people on the Supreme Court cared a lot about the outcome of the 2000 election. Five of them cared too much.
Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦 
You must be logged in to post a comment.