Editor,
I am writing in response to Rebekah Casey's letter in Monday's Daily Lobo titled "Self-pitying liberals distort Bush's fight for democracy."
As a self-pitying liberal, I took exception to several of her statements and thought I might offer a few points of clarification.
First, Casey is correct that we cannot accept that "the majority of freedom-loving Americans chose Bush to lead America," mostly because we are not prone to believing things that are unequivocally false. In the course of my research, I could not find any statistics regarding the voting habits of the category of Americans described as freedom-loving. I did discover that even though Bush received a majority of votes by those who voted in the 2004 election, according to CNN, his 51 percent share totaled only 62 million votes - not very impressive in a country with a population of nearly 300 million people - 217.8 million of them of voting age and eligibility according to the 2000 Census.
By my calculations, Bush received support from 28.5 percent of the electorate. In addition, over 96 million Americans did not vote at all, and I suspect that Casey's invitation to lick the hand of fanatic Islam may not be the great morale-booster non-voters will need to get to the polls in 2008.
Though the Democratic candidate clearly did not win, I have safely concluded that Bush does not command the attention of the majority of freedom-loving Americans, unless, if Casey were right, nearly 156 million Americans are not in fact freedom-loving.
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I'd also like to counter the claim that "the Bush administration has delivered democracy to a dictatorship in the Middle East and has neutralized a threat against America and others." If I'm not mistaken, none of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers were Iraqi, there are exactly zero confirmed reports of weapons of mass destruction recovered from Iraq and Colin Powell himself regrets his failed presentation regarding those weapons to the United Nations. In regards to the newly democratic Iraq: As Madeleine Albright said, nobody in the Middle East is looking at Iraq and saying, "I want my country to look like that," and quite frankly, neither are we.
Katherine Frew
Daily Lobo reader
