Nothing’s perfect in life

The first episode of the new radio series of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is available now on the BBC website. NOTE: that episode will disappear from the site a week from today, replaced by episode 2, and so on, so don’t procrastinate.

Rummy on the possibility of holding Iraqi elections in only part of the country: “Well, so be it. Nothing’s perfect in life, so you have an election that’s not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet.” National elections that cover only part of the, you know, nation aren’t “not quite perfect”--they’re not real elections. And, as I said a day or two ago, the electoral system we’ve imposed on Iraq means there won’t even be vacant seats under those circumstances, but seats will be distributed just as if the election were truly national.

Yesterday Bush asked the UN to set up a fund to foster democracy--however and by whoever that might be defined. Today, in a sort of mirror-image of that, Russia proposed the creation of a UN list of terrorism suspects--however and by whoever that might be defined--who every nation would be required to extradite. I thought it was incredible that no one noticed the revolutionary nature of the UN vote last year to demote Iraq from the status of a sovereign nation and hand control of it over to the US, a power to judge the legitimacy of its member states that I really don’t think the UN has. Now it’s supposed to decide which of its members are legitimate democracies under Bush’s plan, and eliminate political asylum under Putin’s, deferring to the labeling by member states of its internal opponents as terrorists. New world order, indeed.