New plan for me and democracy for you.

Ok so apparently in LA when people hear the word Republican they think you’re going to beat them over the head with your bible then steal their money (especially if they’re poor) and use it to fund the war in Iraq. People ask me about my political beliefs and I’m all over the place but at the end of the day I am a registered Republican (that has nothing to do with supporting this administration or not, and I haven’t been to church for a non-wedding or funeral in over 5 years). Well I’m going to post random short musings on the world as I see fit. Basically I no longer need to be focused on the TV so while watching it I’ll write up this random stuff. If you MySpacers only want me to put up humorous stuff then let me know and I’ll post this random crap on my old blog. Oh and I’ll keep them short not like my travel blogs, and remember I never proofread these things so if you find errors- oh well.

Well well well isnt our democracy policy coming back to bite us in the ass. The political philosopher Edmund Burke was a conservative because he believed that change should always be slow and gradual or else we will end up with unintended consequences. Well America welcome to your unintended consequences. The funny thing about this one is that while it might have been unintended it definitely wasn’t unforeseen.

So we have this policy of promoting democracy everywhere in the world- ok I’m all for it but now we have a small problem. Hamas was just elected to a majority in the Palestinian parliament and the US is throwing around the idea of condemning them and not dealing with them until they denounce terrorism. What kind of ridiculous message are we sending to the Palestinian people and to the rest of the world as long as we’re at it. “You can have a democracy as long as you elect the people we want you to elect.” Well I guess this is a better policy than propping up dictators in the Mid-East and Latin America like we do. I understand not giving them the millions of dollars in aid that we used to give to the corrupt PLO but you cant not deal with them and you cant condemn their government. That part of the world is more pro-violence and anti-US and Israel than anywhere else in the world so what did we expect them to elect. To the contrary we need to support this government and show them that we support democracy (while we wont fund this current leadership which is our prerogative to fund whoever we want) we can show them that we will support any legitimate election. If anything it sounds like it was a more legitimate election than even our past few elections (No im not saying Bush is illegitimate just that there was obviously controversy while here there is no controversy arising from the election process there). This wasn’t like Iran or Turkey where there are “elections” but everyone knows who runs the country, this was actually a legitimate election where the people were fed up with the current leadership and showed them that it was time for change. Let’s deal with them, its not like things can get much worse with Hamas. My point is that our simplistic policy is that democracy lead to peace, well here is the first real test of democracy where the people doing the voting aren’t all for peace so lets throw them a bone and show them how much friendlier we’ll be when they do things through a legitimate transparent process.

And I find it interesting how funerals are some of the most political events. They're showing the speeches at Coretta Scott King's funeral and it reminds me of some of the funerals i've attended that turned so political it might as well have been a bunch of rocks in the casket.