Democracy and Hypocrisy
6 November 2008Barack Obama won the US Presidential Election the other day. Surely you heard. It was in all the papers.
Interestingly the next day I heard a co-worker say, “He’s not my President.”
In 2000 George Bush won the Presidential Election. Well, kinda. Anyway, he was sworn in as President in 2001. I didn’t vote for him. Didn’t much care for him. that opinion hasn’t improved over the past almost-eight-years. However, as an American, he was my President, like it or not. Not the one I voted for, but he has been my President.
See…that’s how democracy works: someone wins, someone loses. I pointed this out to my co-worker and asked, “So, you only like democracy when your guy wins?”
That really pissed him off. He started to say something, then spun around to face his computer, probably realizing that the argument wasn’t going to work. Or would sound hypocritical.
Interesting other arguments. People who supported McCain pointed out that while Obama won an overwhelming victory by the Electoral College he only won the popular vote by something like 8 million votes. Yet in 2004 when Bush won, he only had 16 Electoral College votes more than the 270 needed and the spread was just over 3,000,000 real votes, yet I recall people crowing about more people than ever before voting for George W. Bush…of course ignoring the point that more people had voted against him than had ever voted against anyone ever before, too. Those statistics the same people didn’t want to bring up this time. Seems that people love the Electoral College when it works in their favor and hate it when it doesn’t. I admit that it’s silly and do hate it, regardless of who won.
Hypocrisy is such fun.
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