Burritos AND blow jobs

Clinton came to California to help Gray Davis out, and practically convinced me to vote for the recall by arguing for the most anemic form of democracy possible, an elective dictatorship punctuated every few years by elections: “You hire somebody in an election and you say, ‘Here’s your employment contract. Through good times and bad we are giving you a contract for four years. And then in four years we will make a judgment about what you have done…’” That’s not only the crappiest civics lesson ever, but coming from the king of the focus group and the eternal election campaign, it’s all a bit rich.

He makes the case that if this recall goes through, no politician will ever make a tough choice again. Again, this is Clinton speaking, the man whose idea of a tough choice was between a burrito and a blow job, but his conception of politics is that first you make yourself popular to win an election and then you make unpopular decisions. By implication, he’s saying that the true business of government, the most important decisions, are not made by any democratic process, but in spite of it. That if a choice is tough, it can’t be made democratically. One of two things has to happen under this theory: either a candidate lies and/or evades during the campaign, so that what you get isn’t what you voted for, or you elect someone based on their character and then sit back passively, trusting their judgment will always be correct. Neither one, Edmund Burke to the contrary, is democracy, and as I’m sure you’ve noticed that both describe the modus operandi of George W. Bush.

You can hardly say that politicians were elected to make hard choices, when none of them were elected on a platform of hard choices. It’s all tax cuts plus increased spending and endless wars, burritos and blow jobs. By now you must all be thinking that the American people would never elect a politician who spoke honestly. Possibly, but it’s a chicken and egg thing: did weak-minded voters create pandering politicians, or did the politicians condition voters to respond only to promises of sunshine and puppy dogs? In the end it doesn’t matter. Tough choices are just that, choices, which are tough because they are about making people’s lives harder; exactly the kinds of choices that require democratic input and public discussion.

Here endeth the sermon.

Uh, can I still vote for Thong Girl after that?

(Later): or indeed anyone. Yes, the 9th Circuit issued an order postponing the recall election, unless it is overturned by the US Supreme Court, but I can’t see the US Supreme Court violating the principle that every vote be counted equally and allowing faulty... oh, you know where I’m going with this. Actually, the 9th Circuit claims to have based its decision on the Supremes’ Bush v. Gore travesty, but you know they were snickering as they wrote that, although McClintock, Issa and others are attacking the decision as political in words identical to those of D’s in 2000. Anyway, if the vote gets pushed to March, at the same time as the D primaries, look for the R’s to do something to get their rabid supporters out there like, say, pushing an initiative to repeal driver’s licenses for illegal aliens. The Arnold may have lost this issue, since he seems to have violated his original visa requirements by working illegally here. Actually, a delay to March would definitely kill his candidacy, since he couldn’t possibly avoid taking positions on anything for that long. Well, maybe he could, I dunno, but it would be fun to watch him try.

The Post has a story about the decline and fall of efforts to modernize voting systems. It’s the sort of story that could have been written two years ago and the numbers filled in later, it was that obvious. Congress appropriated 60% of the money it should have (declining to 50% next fy), and none of it has been spent, because state plans have to be approved by a commission that Bush hasn’t bothered setting up. The Post talks very briefly at the end about the fact that the shiny new touch-screen systems states love so much may not actually work or be secure; there was a piece on McNeil-Lehrer today. Still, as the lawyer for one Cal. recall leader says, if punch cards were good enough to elect President Bush... All this would go away if we went back to paper and pencil, like god intended.

The US and EU so contrived the failure of the WTO trade talks so that it was the poor nations that walked out. And all the US wanted in return for not destroying Third World agricultural economies with subsidies, was to be allowed to take over completely every part of the economies of those countries that involved any implement more sophisticated than a hoe. Basically, multinationals could force countries to remove any laws that prevented them making money, including environmental, workplace safety, you name it. And the US rep then made some snotty comment about “can do” people versus “can’t do.”

Speaking of snotty comments, Colin Powell about the French on Iraq: “We were right, they were wrong, and I am here.” Remind yourself of this the next time you feel a need to think of the French as arrogant and obnoxious.

In the continuing Third Worldization of Italy, Berlusconi intends to have an amnesty for illegally built buildings, of which there are many. Forget the lack of planning permission or safety standards, just pay the government a fine. The motive for this, as government officials admit readily, is purely to raise revenue for the state.

A much more evil version of that is offered by the evil president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, who wants to give his buddies in the death squads absolute immunity for assassinations and atrocities in exchange for fines. The NYT says the US helped draft this piece of sliminess. Oh, and drug traffickers are buying membership in the death squads to get access to this immunity.

The British National Health Service is fading fast. Waiting lists and lack of specialists mean that surgery is 4-7 times as fatal as in the US. And here’s a story: a man on vacation in Spain gets a call that his mother in Derbyshire, 86, is going into the hospital with pneumonia. She called an ambulance, he went to the airport in another country, guess who got to the hospital first. She had a stroke the next day and died.