Oh - right. There's no hockey season this year...the players and owners are squabbling over - what was it? - oh yes, salaries. Like I care. I haven't seen a hockey game since I won tickets at a company Christmas party some years ago.
I was thinking today that I really should be paying more attention to the so-called elections about to take place in Iraq.
So, I went poking around my favourite web news sites (and a couple like al-Jazeera's english language service as well, just out of curiousity).
What do I find? Very little really:
- The insurgents (resistance, freedom fighters, terrorists - whatever) are busy trying to disrupt the election by bombing everything in sight.
- The Americans are, of course, insisting the elections must go forward.
- The British are musing about pulling out of Iraq
Of course, there's been exactly nothing about the elections themselves. There's a couple of hundred parties running. As far as I can tell, they are divided along religious and ethnic lines (this being derived from a CBC Radio article talking about the Kurdish region of Iraq). What are the issues? As far as I can tell, there either aren't any, or they aren't being covered.
My guess is that the US is pulling all kinds of puppet strings to make it look as though there is a 'valid' election going on. I have a sneaky feeling that this election is a little like the Asterix comic 'Asterix and The Big Fight', where it comes down to a fight with the Romans, no matter what happens in the fight between the two village chiefs (Vitalstatistix and Ceramix). The US has too much invested in Iraq to allow for anything other than a pro-US government to be elected. (In fact, they probably can't afford to...)
When Iraq holds an election without foreign troops in the streets to 'keep the peace', then I'll start believing that the outcome has some validity. In the meantime, it's about as interesting as a provincial election in Alberta...
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Some years ago? SOME years ago? That was a little longer than that - try the early '90s. As I recall they were donated by the garbage removal company. And it has been a few years since you last went to a Corporate Christmas party Yeghads! I am feeling old tonite.
On the contrary, even though the outcome is a foregone conclusion, there are always potential for some interesting sidelines. For example: in the Alberta election Varsity got Chase, Currie received Taylor and, not all that surprisingly, a Liberal upset Hlady too. And there was the drama of watching Klein and speculating over which pair of shoes he would be wearing the next time he decided to put his foot in his mouth.
Sometimes it can be as interesting to watch the process of a rigged election, it can be very telling about the players - who is "set up", who is doing the rigging, and how others are reacting to it. Will we ever see the REAL story of what is actually happening? Probably not, the States has a fair bit of control over the spin that they put on the media, but even a distorted glimpse through the warped mirror of US influenced media will prove of interest.
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