DPRM The Democratic Party Resuscitation Movement

All writing in blue are my comments, all writing in black is a direct quote from the National Review Online
What exactly does democracy — "people power" — really mean? Even the Greeks who invented this peculiar institution were not quite sure. Was it just rule by a majority vote? Or did it include mechanisms and subsidies to ensure the participation of the poor? Or to protect the minority from mob rule? Aristotle himself was baffled about what actually distinguished some forms of oligarchies from democracies; indeed his Politics can offer only a hopelessly confused typology.

okay first off it turned out Aristotle was an idiot.

... (just more of this drivel)

In light of the propaganda value of giving lip service to freedom, dictatorships on the Right also rarely call themselves "The Autocracy of Chile"* or "The Nicaraguan** Dictatorship."* Many of the Arab autocracies — the Saudi monarchy's employment of "kingdom" is an exception — are officially "republics." Of course, not a single one has a really consensual government or regularly scheduled elections that are truly free.

*the US gov't supported these dictatorships
**Not actually a word

So most countries that are not democratic claim that they are; and yet democracy itself turns out to be much more than just the occasion of one free election. And this paradox can raise real problems. Look at the Iranian elections of 1980 that took place in a climate of intimidation and without constitutional guarantees. Secular candidates were harassed and voters intimidated. Within three years there was essentially only one Islamic party and thereafter only sporadic rigged elections. The Iranian "president" and "parliament" meant little then and mean less now, as we learn from the recent forced withdrawal of a number of "reform" candidates.

Yeah and look at the American elections of 2000

Ditto for the Palestinians. Arafat had one sort of free election in 1996. But his "opponent," Samiha Kahil, was denied commensurate air time and contended with the bribery, violence, and censorship of Fatah, before garnering a mere nine percent of the vote. There have been no presidential elections since, no free judiciary, and no free press. The Palestinian Authority is about as democratic as the regime of Saddam Hussein, who "won" his similarly fixed election by about the same plurality as Arafat. Yet the New York Times praised Arafat in 1996 for his electoral victory and like most others in the media has been reluctant since to condone his isolation to his Ramallah bunker, given that chimera that he was a "democratically elected leader."

So now if you don't get the popular vote and still win the election it's a bad thing

Haiti is not much different. An exiled Mr. Aristide was restored by the United States in 1996, on the pretext that he probably won the 1994 election. But since then he has engaged in criminality like Enron, censorship like the USAPATRIOT act, blackmail like exposing an undercover agent because of a spouse's comments, and violence NY anti-war + riot gear fiasco to ensure that both the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2000 engineered to his own satisfaction like Florida. For all his priestly past Governor of Texas, New York sojourns Daddy was president, and professed sympathy for the poor Compassionate Conservatism, he too is a one-vote, one-time thug. Here it is not so easy to draw a parallel, for Bush is more than a one-time-thug.

Haliburton, Enron, Oil buddies...but you know, that's different, they're all white people.

In some ways these aborted democracies are more pernicious than the old-style dictatorships, in that they use their purportedly democratic geneses as cover for some pretty awful things. The modus operandi works something like this. An initial election follows after the demise of a prior government either associated with autocracy or the machinations of the West — the abdication of a Duvalier, Shah, or Israeli governing authority. Jimmy Carter arrives to certify (sometimes quite accurately) that the election is more or less fair — even as he can say little about the absence of a ratified constitution, free press, legitimate opposition, or bill of rights. U.N. "observers" lurk and prowl in the shadows to legitimize the proceedings, understandably scurrying back to their compounds or hotel the first time some hired goon sticks an AK-47 up their noses.


Now who ever would hire a goon? (<== sarcasm)

In the years that follow (such "reelected" leaders never lose and never step down), various human-rights organizations and Western leftists subsequently praise the new progressiveness of the "emerging democracy" and turn mostly a blind idea to the predictable theft, killing, and lawlessness that follow.

ONE example please?

So happy are supporters of elected indigenous scoundrels that they issue a lifelong pass, one that has the practical effect to encourage all sorts of pathologies, from making nuclear bombs (Pakistan and Iran and India, but they aren't Arab so it's OK )to blowing up innocent civilians (Arafat, Sharon, Bush, oh, right...they're white people). In most cases, vocal Westerner sympathizers — a Sartre, Foucault, or Chomsky — are never interested much in real democratic government, but instead find a vicarious delight in seeing raw power employed under the slogans of "social justice" and "national liberation" and expressed in predictable anti-Western tones — democracy providing them necessary cover on the cheap for cheering on pretty awful rulers.

Yeah that's right, all communists want us to live in pagodas.

...

What to do when we wish to leave — and those most likely to subvert the process most want us out? The most important development now unfolding in Iraq is not the date of elections, but the emergence of a constitution that protects secularism, women's rights, and ethnic minorities, and a popular culture — Internet, television, free assembly, and consumerism — that promotes free and easy association.

Since when do Conservatives like all that stuff?
...(Still more drivel).
It is truly amazing how much these Conservatives lie about everything.