Will of the People---now the world is really scared of us.

[tedzbear]

Will of the People

Justin Podur has a must-read post over at the The Killing Train -- definitely worth much discussion:


It looks like even if the United States electoral system was capable of expressing the people’s choice, the people would choose George W Bush.
It looks like voters in a dozen states decided to ban gay marriage, by huge margins, deciding to ruin other people’s lives with no benefit to themselves.

That means that it is time to admit something. The greatest divide in the world today is not between the US elite and its people, or the US elite and the people of the world. It is between the US people and the rest of the world. The first time around, George W Bush was not elected. When the United States planted cluster bombs all over Afghanistan, disrupted the aid effort there, killed thousands of people, and occupied the country, it could be interpreted as the actions of a rogue group who had stolen the elections and used terrorism as a pretext to wage war. When the United States invaded Iraq, killing 100,000 at the latest count, it could be argued that no one had really asked the American people about it and that the American people had been lied to. When the United States kidnapped Haiti’s president and installed a paramilitary dictatorship, it could be argued that these were the actions of an unelected group with contempt for democracy.

With this election, all of those actions have been retroactively justified by the majority of the American people.

The first time around the Bush people acted without a mandate. Today, the only constituency that could have stopped them has given them a mandate to go beyond what they have done.



Posted by zeynep Underthesamesun.org