New Zealand Butt Out

I read another guy from New Zealand who is disdaining the "undemocratic" way that the Democratic nominee is being selected.  Apparently there is something wrong when the person who gets the most votes is ahead.   It was another Sanders supporter in another country who, of course, doesn't have to live with the consequences of the election here.

I am still waiting on whether or not I get a response to my point that under a parliamentary system that the choice of the head of government isn't by popular vote but is chosen by those high up in the party apparatus - NO OPEN PRIMARY IN A PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM.   It isn't even as democratic as the old U.S. system in which the party nominees were chosen by fat cats and party movers and shakers in smoke filled rooms - at least in the United States the voters did get to choose which of those would be president.   We recently got one chosen by party fat cats,  George W. Bush, and the Republican fat cats were wearing black robes, the results were the worst presidency in our modern history.  I'm not sure that the advantage that the method of choosing the prime minister might be concluded to at least be competent and not insane or stupid is that much of an advantage when they are even more likely to be corrupt. on average.

Ignoring the silly medieval hold-over of pretending the monarch does anything but be the world's most expensive rubber stamp.

Another one from Canada told me I didn't know how a parliamentary system worked because I made similar points - he didn't refute anything I said, just sort of automatically seemed confident in thinking a stater wouldn't know something like that.   He did tell me something I'd never read before, that to join one of the parties in Canada there is an admission fee - at least that's what he said,  I didn't bother to check.   Well, here all you've got to do is declare your party affiliation when you register to vote.  I've never paid a cent to be a member of the Democratic Party in more than forty years of being a member.  It's not seen as a privilege you have to pay for, it's a right.

The idea that a parliamentary democracy produces more democratic results than the American system is silly.  It's as capable of producing a horrible government as any system.  Brian Stephen Harper [sorry, I was going to include Brian Mulroney and the edit got out of hand], Margaret Thatcher... I'll concentrate on the "Westminster" species as that's where the buttinskies are coming from.  Britain had parliamentary government for its entire sordid history of class privilege, disenfranchisement, Poor Laws and military-corporate imperialism.   Americans who yearn after that are idiots who don't seem to know more than they learn from imported BBC costume dramas. Most of those as shown on PBS and in gushy indie period movies.  Our system stinks but copying the Brits isn't going to get us something better.

Don't get me wrong, the United States has a lot to learn from other countries, Canada has much to teach us, their voting system as I last studied it was a model of efficient, honest practice. I haven't dared to go back and look at what the Harper years did to it.   But I don't think they've really got everything to teach us.   I really don't care for it when they, or someone who lives under an even less democratic political system slams ours.  I'd rather hear what citizens of the United States living with our admittedly bad system have to say about it,  they are far more likely to know the details of what's wrong with things.  I wouldn't dream of thinking I knew enough about the system in Canada, New Zealand, Britland or any other country to figure I knew better than the people who lived there on how to improve the mechanics of it.   You'd think they'd have come up with some way to get the choice of the head of government out of the hands of entrenched party apparatchiks.

There, and I didn't even say "Butt out, Kiwi", even as I felt like it.