More on Iraq’s elections, from my Tech Central Station column:

America had its Declaration of Independence, and now Iraq has had its Blue-Finger Revolution. Just don’t expect those on the far left to afford the Iraqis the respect that they are due.

Just as the colonists who signed onto Jefferson’s handiwork pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to each other, Iraq’s bluefingers have risked their very necks — not just in showing up at the polls on Sunday, but in the weeks and months ahead as the indelible, blue marks of their bravery slowly, slowly fade from their skin.

Though perhaps it is mawkish to dwell on the point, Americans should not forget — and many will not be able to — the great physical risk that each Iraqi voter willingly undertook. It’s not as if they weren’t warned. The blue finger was already a symbol in the weeks leading up to the election: Reportedly, al Zarqawi’s men put up posters in Mosul warning, “You vote, you die.” The picture accompanying that poster showed an ink-stained finger next to a headless corpse.

Even a large segment of the media seems to have noticed.

Of course Michael Moore chooses to focus on this (”British Troops Killed in Plane Crash Near Baghdad”), giving it the lead photo on his site, instead of the elections.

Hey, gotta find something bad.

Of course, I don’t mean to downplay the loss of life. But this isn’t today’s story.

And here’s one last thought on the entire interview, relayed to me by former guest blogger Jacob Gershman, of The New York Sun.

Kerry must have been expecting a worse result in the Iraqi election. He must have scheduled this interview in the hopes of saying, “I told you so.”

Well, Johnny, in that mature spirit, we told you so.

Here’s another thing about Kerry that’s always annoyed me. He always seems ready to take foreign leaders at their words — which, not to get too fancy with the language here, is stupid.

Diplomacy is just another word for lying.

For instance, here’s what Kerry had to say when Russert asked him what President Bush has to do going forward:

SEN. KERRY: Well, you have to behave as if you really are at war. I’ll give you an example. I was in Egypt three weeks ago. I met with President Mubarak. We were talking about training. I asked him, “You know, why don’t you do more training?” His response was, “We’ve offered do more training. We’re doing 146 officers today. I don’t know why we’re not doing more. People haven’t followed up with us. They haven’t gotten back to us.”

And, a question or two later:

I mean, look, I sat with any number of Arab leaders, and I said to them, you know, “Mr. Prime Minister” or “Mr. President, is your country–do you believe Iraq, being successful there is important?” The answer is yes. “Do you believe that if it’s a failed state, that’s a threat to the region?” The answer is yes. “Do you believe that it could be a haven for terrorism even more than it is today?” and so forth. The answer is yes. Then you say, “Well, why aren’t you there? What is the problem?” And the problem becomes one of the way in which this administration–they will tell you openly–has approached them and the world.

On three different occasions, the Bush administration spurned the offer of the United Nations, the international community. People have offered police training. People have offered peacekeepers. People have offered other forms of assistance, and our administration has gone it alone.

These statements are really breathtaking. Either John Kerry is as naïve as a six-year-old girl (in which case he had no business even running for president) or he knows that these “leaders” — in the distinctly unelected sense — are lying through their rotting, despotic teeth (in which case he has no business criticizing the president).

Arab “leaders” wish Iraq well about as much as Southern plantation owners wished Northern abolitionists well. A successful democratic transition in Iraq is about as welcome in Iran, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc., etc., as a slave rebellion would have been in antebellum Georgia.

The people of Iraq are former slaves to a Baathist regime who have been liberated and now are taking control of their own destiny as a nation for the first time. This is earth-shattering, if it succeeds.

And the earth that is being shattered is that directly under the feet of the despots and murderers John Kerry would build America’s Iraq policy upon.

But, of course, Kerry didn’t contain his criticisms to the Iraqi election. He had some interesting things to say about the American election, too.

Specifically, he said that Americans voted for President Bush because Osama bin Laden scared them into it. You’ll all remember that B. La (kind of like J. Lo — work with me, folks) released a tape the weekend before the election — urging Americans to vote for John Kerry, and seemingly implying that blue states would be safe and red states not.

Here’s Russert’s question, and Kerry’s answer:

MR. RUSSERT: At the Clinton Library dedication on November 18, a few weeks after the election, you were quoted as saying, “It was the Osama bin Laden tape. It scared the voters,” the tape that appeared just a day before the election here. Do you believe that tape is the reason you lost the race?

SEN. KERRY: I believe that 9/11 was the central deciding issue in this race. And the tape–we were rising in the polls up until the last day when the tape appeared. We flat-lined the day the tape appeared and went down on Monday. I think it had an impact.

So, let me get this straight. Bin Laden offered Americans a truce, essentially saying that those who chose to throw out President Bush — and thus end America’s aggressive War on Terror — would be safe. But Americans, cowards that they are, were scared into voting for President Bush, for seeing through the war in Iraq and for aggressively pursuing terrorists wherever they find purchase.

That’s just really… interesting.

I’m sorry. Stupid is the word I’m looking for.

And then, Kerry added insult to injury by flip-flopping again:

MR. RUSSERT: Ten seconds. The most important thing you learned running for president?

SEN. KERRY: How great, how unbelievable the American people themselves are. They are just–the courage of the American people day to day blew me away.

It did that, Johnny. It blew you right back to your job in the Senate.

Not surprisingly, the first one in line to try to undermine the legitimacy of the Iraqi election was John Kerry, who bizarrely chose today to do a full hour on “Meet the Press”:

MR. RUSSERT: Do you believe this election will be seen by the world community as legitimate?

SEN. KERRY: A kind of legitimacy–I mean, it’s hard to say that something is legitimate when a whole portion of the country can’t vote and doesn’t vote.

This quote goes to the heart of one of the major problems with John Kerry, a problem I identified here.

Basically, he doesn’t seem to understand what leadership is. He doesn’t seem to understand that the very act of his questioning the legitimacy of the Iraq election in and of itself serves to undermine its legitimacy in the international community. He doesn’t seem to understand that sometime people don’t need to hear his pointy-headed analysis — they just need him to say the right thing.

In fact, this reminds me of nothing so much as when, during the campaign, Kerry called Ayad Allawi an American puppet right after the new prime minister addressed Congress.

Now, luckily, even John Kerry can’t screw the aftermath of the election up. But why does he have to try so hard?

I don’t know a lot about this site, but it seems to be providing good coverage of the Iraqi elections, just now getting underway.

To the Americans who have spent the last three months whining about “irregularities” in Ohio and deriding the sacrifices being made by Americans, Britons and most of all Iraqis in the cause of freedom, may today be their comeuppance.

The courage of those Iraqis braving threat of death — and many, it seems certain, will die today — to vote is almost beyond words. The people of Afghanistan made this journey not long ago. May Iraq’s people be even half as successful.

And may swift justice come to those who would keep Iraq enslaved to the oppression and terror of Islamist and Baathist rule.

The folks over at Alarming News seem to appreciate my love of commas as a headline device.

Warms my heart.

On Wednesday, when I posted my defense of Maggie Gallagher, I, in passing, called her a bigot. A commenter challenged me to defend that characterization.

Well, certainly.

Another commenter posted a link to this bigoted article from Gallagher, where she tries to use one unhappy child of a gay couple to discredit the entire idea of gay marriage / gay adoption.

Then, I would also point to this column, “Scenes From a Neo-Marriage Culture”:

So it begins, in Massachusetts:

“I will try not to make any mistakes,” one official said to two men in Boston City Hall. “But since it’s the first wedding, I might call one of you the bride.” Their marriage license reads not “Bride” and “Groom” but “Party A” and “Party B.”

At the wedding of Julie and Hillary Goodridge, who lent their name to the historic Massachusetts supreme court decision ordering same-sex marriage, guests sang, “Here come the brides, so gay with pride, isn’t it a wonder that they somehow survived.”

“I pronounce you spouse and spouse,” intoned Joan Drysdale, justice of the peace in Provincetown, Mass.

The column goes on as such, free of argumentation, aimed at nothing other than stoking the hatred inside of her readers — showing them something that repulses them, pushing their buttons, and trying to get them out of their houses to vote against gay rights.

One could go on and on with Gallagher’s columns. I don’t think it’s necessary.

Plenty of conservatives will argue that Gallagher never actually says she hates gays, or is disgusted by them. Well, she’d have to be pretty stupid to come right out and say it. But she, and many, many others like her at conservative publications play these kinds of games day in and day out.

I really haven’t found a thing on who funds Gallagher’s Institute for Marriage and Public Policy. Didn’t find anything on its Web site. Didn’t find anything on Nexis.

I’d be happy to hear from anyone who knows who’s behind it.

(The point here, to be clear, is that I see little difference between working for the funders of a think tank and working for a government agency.)

Often, politics makes me want to die. The amount of false outrage in a campaign season is enough to make you want to put a knife through the candidates’ eyes. After a while, I suspect, they even begin to believe that they’re really outraged — losing all track of normal human emotion. It’s like a particularly awful form of autism. “I’m an excellent politician. Five minutes to outrage.”

Anyway, what’s got me in a lather is this ludicrous press release, put out by some idiot challenging Hillary Clinton for Senate in 2006.

Here’s a bit:

ADAM BRECHT, U.S. SENATE CANDIDATE, BLASTS SEN. CLINTON FOR PLAYING IN FLORIDA WHILE NEW YORKERS BATTLE SNOW

NEW YORK, January 24, 2005 — Adam Brecht, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from New York, criticized Senator Hillary Clinton’s decision to spend the weekend in Florida — first partying at Donald Trump’s wedding in Palm Beach, then on to Key West — while real New Yorkers were socked by a major snowstorm.

Read the rest at the New York Observer’s house blog, Politicker.