Month: January 2004

Dot-com Dean

Looks like Hodean is going to have a rocky road on the way to the Democratic presidential nomination, if indeed he makes it at all. His third-place showing in Iowa will be hard to recover from, especially since he’d been camped out there for two years and was the odds-on favorite as recently as three weeks ago.
Senator Kerry is a better candidate for the general election, but his nomination will doom the Democrats anyway. Why? Because Hodean’s supporters aren’t going to campaign for a regular, boring, “establishment” guy. They wanted moxie, spunk, fire — all of the things that Kerry does not have. The Deanie babies will be disillusioned with the election, and possibly with politics in general. That’s fine by me — I hope they’re so mentally scarred by the experience that they never vote again. If they do vote, they’ll probably latch onto whomever the Green Party nominates this year, which is the next-best thing.
Let me be the first one to tag Hodean as “Dot-com Dean.” His candidacy has had the feel of a dot-com company circa 1997. Hodean attracted a ton of venture capital in the form of Internet donations, and his “user base” of college students and graying hippies were excited about the novelty. Yet when it came time to deliver the product, it didn’t quite live up to the hype — the rollout was fraught with gaffes, and the target market didn’t embrace it wholeheartedly. The established “brick and mortar” candidates learned from his mistakes and swept him from the field.
Howard Dean: the Pets.com of Election 2004.

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Categorized as Politics

Letting Shiites have their say

Mark Shea posted a snide comment about this image of Iraqi Shiites demonstrating for speedier elections:

I had the following to say in the comments box, after seeing some of the less-than-pithy postings:

I hate to introduce something so vulgar as “facts” to this discussion, but here are a few:
1. Most Iraqis are Shiites.
2. Despite that fact, most Iraqis do not like Iranians, despite Iran being the only other majority Shia nation.
3. Shiites have no problems with “graven images.” Their brand of Islam is quasi-incarnational, in that they believe in the spiritual efficacy of natural objects, unlike, say, the Wahabbis, who are very anti-materialistic. Go into any Iraqi Shiite home and you will see at least one, and probably many, pictures of Hussein Ali, the founder of the Shia branch of Islam. You might even find, as I did in one family’s home, that they have a picture of Jesus as the Good Shepherd.
4. There are fundamentalists and then there are fundamentalists. The majority of Iraqi Shiites are salt-of-the-earth types who simply want to harvest their dates or run their auto shop. They have very conservative religious views but they are not interested in an Islamic revolution, much less in exporting an Islamic revolution.
5. In all of the opinion polls conducted since the war, Iraqis have overwhelmingly indicated their preference for a secular government rather than an Islamic one. That Iraq is an Islamic country, and their secular law will likely reflect their religious values, is to be expected and even encouraged. It might be nice if our laws consistenly reflected our values — perhaps that’s an idea they could export to the U.S. I believe that idea — the enshrinement of the majority’s preference — is part of what we call “democracy.”

I found I liked the Shiites when I was among them, and Catholics have more in common with them than other branches of Islam. If I had more time, I’d write a long essay about it.