"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under it leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble opinion, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution." John Adams, www.amlibpub.com/top/fathers_quotes.html
Mike Huckabee had to dispute the Washington caucus because it had been called before all the votes had been counted. The more I look at the goings on in the US, the more the whole thing strikes me as bent.
People simply are not voting for who they think they are: they are electing delegates, not candidates; and then they will elect the Electoral College, not the President and Vice-President. Which would be fine if that were what it said on the ballot papers and election literature. But it isn't.
Just as the Electoral College came as a shock to most people in 2000, expect this year's Democratic Convention to astonish them when the superdelegates descend to annoint Billary Clinton exactly as they would have done if the entire caucus and primary process had never taeken place.
Oh well, as the Founding Fathers themselves put it:
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." Benjamin Franklin, http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/
history/husseinindex.htm
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." John Adams, http://www.quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes.nsf/quotes!ReadForm
"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of Government, have erroneously supposed, that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions and their passions." James Madison's Federalist Paper No. 10
In a pure democracy, "there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual." James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 10
"In tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy." Edmund Randolph
"Real liberty is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate government." Alexander Hamilton
"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities." Alexander Hamilton
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." Thomas Jefferson,
www.hillwatch.com/PPRC/Quotes/Democracy.aspx
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