John L. Perry
Monday, Sept. 23, 2002

This is the United States of America, not some banana republic where military dictators control almost anything that breathes and everything that doesn't.

The United States is not a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy where crazies in power and crazies out of power ride through the streets in Toyota pickup trucks, firing off rounds into the sky to fall who-knows-where.

It's What We Fight and Die For

In this country, if you run for election as president you advance your proposals of governance in the free forum of the electoral process. On election day the electorate, not some mob, decides whether you or your political opponent enters public office.

It's politics, and a lot of perfectly good American blood has been spilled creating this process and, over the years, keeping it from being abolished by tyrannies that want none of this nonsense.

If you are an elected member of Congress, and you want to get to first base, you participate in what's known as – and was intended by the Founding Fathers to be – the give-and-take of politics.

It's How We Do Things Here

One party stands for something. So does another. There are on occasion significant differences between what they stand for.

The way you get your policies to become the nation's policies is to work through one or another of these political parties. It's called politics.

Anything a president of the United States does, from kissing a baby to making a State of the Union Address is – and, by God, it had better be – part of the political process.

That's How a Democracy Works

That's how a democracy creates, adjusts, adopts or rejects the policies by which its populace governs itself.

How else is George W. Bush supposed to lead his people – in war and in peace – without resorting to the political process?

Got a Better Idea?

Write a note in a bottle and toss it into the ocean? Scotch-tape it on a stall in the men's facilities down at the bus station? Whisper it to Oprah?

The president comes right out in public and makes his case and asks for the approval – the political approval – of the (you should pardon the expression) body politic.

Those also involved in the process of governance resort to the same means – political expression – to modify or oppose the president's policies and gain acceptance for their own.

Is Being Political So Wrong?

What can go awry in the political process is when practitioners employ advocacy deliberately to distort the information base and thereby corrupt the decision-making of the electorate – for the purpose of personal or partisan gain.

That's rotten politics – but it's still politics. And it's still part of the democratic process.

Voters are expected to have the wit and wisdom to see through it and rise above it. Usually they do in America, which is about all you can ask in an imperfect world.

Would You Want a Press-ocracy?

Perhaps you would prefer an almighty, unaccountable, elitist oligarchy of press lords telling you what the nation's policies are to be, like it or not. That's what the masters of American mass communication would dearly love.

And that's why they are having such a cow now that President Bush is advancing policies toward Iraq not contrived in their omnipotent editorial-board rooms, confirmed in their laughable focus groups and consecrated in conformity with their precious political correctness.

No, there's nothing wrong with "politicizing" the issue of war with Iraq – which is to say, bringing the American people foursquare into the political process.

What Matters More?

On the contrary, can anyone think of another issue right now that's more important to the lives of all Americans – of the entire Free World – than that?

What better reason to run it through the political process?

God help America – and the entire Free World – when there's no political process to run the overriding issues of the day through.

Beats the idiotic impotence of thronging through the streets, firing off a bunch of popguns into the air.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Saddam Hussein/Iraq

Editor's note:
Saddam Hussein’s race to make a nuclear bomb