764 Hoping the elections will fail

It's bad enough that we have Americans who cast aspersions on our own elections, who register dead people to vote in Chicago and Seattle, and try to disenfranchise minorities by saying they are too dumb to figure out voting machines or ballots and therefore we need recounts. But now they try to mess up the Iraqi elections too! Oh, probably not the same people, but the same attitudes, rumors and lies.

Sunday the world will watch as millions of Arabs go to the polls (I realize that not everyone in Iraq is an Arab or a Muslim, but the majority are). Arabs in non-democratic countries will be watching on their government TV what they don't have--a free election. I get absolutely misty eyed watching the stories of ex-pat Iraqis in the USA driving 8 hours to register, and then repeating the same trip this week to vote. They and the candidates and the poll workers risking their lives have set before us a very high standard (especially those of you who didn't even bother to vote in November--you know who you are).

Belmont Club in a 3-part series on the Iraq election has little good to say about the naysayers, letting one dig his own hole for a foundation for his "shrine of half-forgotten causes":

"Whatever the War on Terror is, it is a duel to the death. A glance at Juan Cole's website -- which is a reliable thermometer of Leftist temper -- is a case in point. It should be the website of a respectable academic but it's a shrine to half-forgotten causes and a casket of exorcisms against half-apprehended devils. To illustrate the right of peaceful assembly he has a photo of flag-draped military caskets being shipped home. To illustrate the the 8th Amendment he has an Abu Ghraib photo. Noonan worries about religion. So do I, coming upon a room of stubbed out and smoked ideas. As for the elections, Cole says they are a joke, and it is doubtful if any poll would persuade him otherwise."