11.04.2008

will they make it three in a row?

Everyone seems pretty confident that Barack Obama will be elected the next President of the United States. I'll feel a lot better when the polls close and he's been declared the winner. Then I'll feel a lot better when a President-elect Obama is inaugurated and Resident-never-elected steps aside.

I'm not convinced either of those things will happen, and I'll breathe a massive sigh of relief they do.

General consensus also says that if the pre-election polls show Obama ahead by a wide margin, it is more difficult for the Republicans to steal the election. That is, close advance polls are a pre-condition to election fraud.

That assumes the thieves care about appearances. But do they? If they've been sufficiently emboldened by their past successes, I can easily imagine a scenario where they don't care at all. If they can flip a few counties, thus stealing a few states, thus stealing an election, why would they care how it looks?

The answer, supposedly, is because there would be a massive outcry. And what of it? Like the schoolyard bully says, And what are you going to do about it?

The really sad part of this whole thing is that if Obama wins tonight, all talk about election fraud will be relegated to the tin-foil hat crew, and the system will just get worse. Earth to US: fair elections are actually more important than who wins. For almost eight years now, I've been asking, if a country doesn't have fair elections, then what makes it a democracy? Still haven't got an answer to that.

It would be an amazing and wonderful thing to see an African American become US President. It's beyond long overdue. I hope we see that tonight, and I hope we see it on January 20.

As far as Obama, that's the only thing I can get excited about.

No comments: