"Except for all those others"

"Dictatorship takes a short time," said Ibrahim Jafari, a Shiite who is expected to be named Iraqi prime minister, reports the Washington Post:

"The reason it took time to reach this first stage is because there's a difference between dictatorship and democracy . . . Democracy takes a longer time, because people need to negotiate with each other to get the best results."

A U.S.-educated Sunni Muslim was selected as speaker of the new Iraqi parliament on Sunday, an important first step in the formation of a national unity government that follows two months of difficult negotiations.

The haggling over posts has left politicians hurrying to meet a mid-August deadline for drafting a new constitution. A referendum on the new constitution and a vote for a new government are supposed to follow.

Some Kurdish politicians and others hope to bring a smaller, secular party into their coalition to help balance a feared religious tilt by Shiite lawmakers, who won the most seats in parliament.

Lawmakers say they are determined to include Sunnis in the government in an effort to defuse the two-year-old Sunni-led insurgency. Sunni clerics had issued a widely heeded call to boycott the Jan. 30 elections.

As Winnie said, democracy's "the worst form of government except for all those others."

Comments

[goomp]

In a democracy those who are elected have the final say as they are nearest to the people. Anything else is a dictatorship. The people make blunders in whom they elect and in the progams they support, but in the long run they chose well enough for democracy to survive.

[Teresa]

Thanks to 24/7 news coverage and INSTANT everything, people can't seem to take their time and get things right anymore. Hey - if the government isn't set up within 24 hours after election... there must be something wrong! ARG! It's so annoying. Unfortunately, people listening to this tripe over and over again - tend to start believing it, even if it doesn't make any sense. *sigh* Can we pull the plug on these 24 hour news channels??? Please???