US democracy brazenly corrupted

A RECENT editorial (June 6) might leave some people scratching their heads and wondering where you can have been during the last two US presidential elections.

You said:, “Whichever candidate succeeds we should all be grateful that the leader of the world's only superpower is elected by proclamation rather than imposed as a figurehead in a single party state, where political difference, let alone dissent, is not even tolerated.”

Neither of those elections was fairly won. Serious questions about vote rigging in Florida and elsewhere remain unanswered. There is a bitter irony in this for the rest of the world — and especially the Iraqi people, who have seen an estimated one million deaths as a consequence of the Bush administration’s claim to be ‘spreading democracy’ in, coincidentally, oil-rich regions.

If it seems unlikely that two of the people most suited to be president of the US should happen to be married to each other, how much more fortuitous are the circumstances which resulted in two Bush family presidencies, all from the same dynasty at the heart of the aforementioned voting irregularities.

It might be better to resist pieties about western democracy — particularly US democracy — when it has seldom been so brazenly corrupted and violently abused as it is now.

Miriam Cotton

Woodlands

Clonakilty

Co Cork