I was watching a PBS show that played some of LBJ's tapes. On one tape, LBJ was talking to some one about how important extending voting rights to him was. As best I can remember, he said, "And I don't care how ignorant they are. I've had ignorant people voting for me my entire life."
I don't so much mind ignorant people voting as I do ignorant people getting elected. :-(
I'm not a conspiracy nut. In fact quite the opposite - I despise arguments about JFK's assassination, for example. To those people I always say, "Oswald got off a lucky shot - get over it." However, late last night, after several adult beverages, I was talking to a dear friend of mine who told me that, although he would only say this to me so as not to sound like a lunatic, he was thinking of the oil/gas lines that need to be run through Afghanistan. Somewhere he'd read that the Caspians were the last great unexploited region of oil reserves. His and my memory was that there were some reports suggesting that our war with Iraq had something to do with the Son's oil dealings in Kuwait. (Recall that 6 months prior to our War with Iraq we had an Undersecretary testifying in Congress that we shouldn't place embargoes on Iraq because "Saddam Hussein is the leading force for democracy in the region.") I replied to my friend that maybe Dubya is much more clever than appearances would indicate. Perhaps, in the grand tradition of our wars in the region, there is more about oil moguls behind this war than meets the eye. If so, this orchestration is truly brilliant. Evil, of course, but very, very clever.