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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill who wrote (99828)	3/29/2005 12:32:55 PM
From: cosmicforce	Respond to of 108807

Thanks for pointing out the incorrect spelling. I'd added "political" to pundit as a clarification and dashed out the door to take my daughter to work with me. No spell check on edits. <Not everyone can start on the top rung of the ladder.> That's not really my point, though. Plato recognized that in a failed democracy that politics became a game of survival of the meanest. It was natural in his Republic that he felt that an oligarchy of specialists trained in handling complex logical and moral issues was superior to that of mean spirited militarism and reactionaries (which was what he'd seen Athenian government become). His tutor and mentor, Aristotle had just been given the death sentence for rather vague changes trumped up by the right wing factions that had overthrown democracy. For the left, it sometimes seems that we have a similar situation brewing again with the fact that the last elections seem to have had voter fraud and that our foreign policy is delivered through a gun-barrel. To compare someone with Hitler is not the pinnacle of forensic style points, to be sure. There are certain mindsets that the extreme right and historical fascists have in common and it is a understandable short hand for people to make the comparison. For PS to use this as some sort of broad dismissal of the concerns of the left about the state overturning democracy is disingenuous. If he is happy with the winning of the elections under dubious circumstances, then it is just as likely that those who feel that the reactionaries have a death-grip on the country are livid. The fact is that the Supreme Court did hand the leadership over to Bush despite the fact that there were ample reasons to question the first election. There were major deviations in exit polls and poll results in key swing states in the second one (also suspicious). I don't feel that such rhetoric is particularly useful, so I avoid it, but that isn't to say that such comparisons are 100% false. There are better comparisons to make within our own flawed periods of history. We don't have to go to Germany, but Tammany, to find examples of elections that were crooked or for demonstrations of self-interested cronyism.