Gracious, Gracious George

The confidence of a man who, on a do-over, won 50.7 percent of ballots cast by those who bothered to vote: First he says he’s got lots of political capital to spend. And now that the public is feeling less keen about embracing his special gift to posterity, the Iraq War and Constitutional Convention, he graciously allows he respects the rights of those who disagree with him, like Cindy Sheehan:

” I strongly support her right to protest. There’s a lot of people protesting, and there’s a lot of points of view about the Iraq war. As you know, in Crawford last weekend there were people from both sides of the issue, or from all sides of the issue there to express their opinions.”

That’s the thing about democracy: We prevent the majority — like the rabble who really aren’t interested any more in getting up every day to the news that 10 or 20 or 30 more people have been blown up since we went to bed and that our sponsored group of Iraqi civics students still can’t write a pretend constitution despite the fact we’ve dropped $200 billion or whatever to set them up in business — we prevent the impatient many from trampling the rights of the few; the rights of people like our president. And that’s another beauty of democracy, Bush style: If you win, you don’t need to worry about majorities, minorities, nothin’. You’re inside, and you got political capital to spend.

Berkeley Vigil

Vigil

About 8:30 tonight, corner of Solano and The Alameda. (Yes, auslanders, The Alameda.) The MoveOn site said 500 people had signed up to join the vigil at this location. We got there about an hour after it started, and there might have been a total of 250 or 300 on the four corners of the intersection, though I’m a big crowd overestimator from way back. It was a social occasion for lots of people. I ran into an old colleague from The Examiner, and Kate met up with a group of her Oakland teacher buddies.