Long live democracy!

My faith in democracy was restored yesterday. Until 2004, I was a firm believer that the general public is much smarter than what politicians take them to be. Most of the time, people would see through the posturing and slandering of politicians, and support the right person or right cause. But in the 2004 USA Presidential election nothing of that sort happened. At that time, President George Bush had already proved himself to be a lightweight, and a stooge of the extreme religious right and the rich. He ran on a platform of fear, warning that Democrats under John Kerry will not be able to protect USA. He projected himself as a tough guy while the real war hero John Kerry was ‘swift boated’. Public apparently bought all this, and re-elected Bush for another four years in the office! That was a hard slap on the face for me, and it took me many days to recover from shock and disappointment. (I still suspect that something funny happened in vote counting that year, as all early exit polls showed a resounding victory for Senator Kerry). I became more and more despondent about the way things were going on in this country. The detention of prisoners in Guntanemo without any trials, the torture pictures of Abu Ghraib, spying on U.S. citizens without any court authorization, approval of torture as means of interrogation, etc. confirmed my fear that the noble ideals of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are fast becoming obsolete. I got the impression that the U.S. public is no longer smart and can be influenced by five second slogans like ‘war on terror’, ‘stay the course’, and ‘cut and run’. Also, I feared that there would be a massive election fraud in 2006 election also, favoring the ruling party.

The stunning election results yesterday proved that I was wrong about my misgivings. This time people spoke loud and clear through their ballots. They had enough of the lies and fear mongering of the Bush administration. Since they cannot vote President Bush out of the office, they did the next best thing they could do. They fired ruling party, Republicans, and gave total control of the Congress to the opposition party, the Democrats. We now will have a check and balance in the Government, like the founding fathers wanted. Thank God, Almighty!

You can fool the public sometime, but not all the time. Long live democracy!