My outrage expands in sympathy with the moderates and secularists in Pakistan today who make up the majority of the Pakistani people.
Political assassination is as old as politics, of course, and we Americans have suffered our share. In just my lifetime, JFK, Bobby, Martin Luther King -- there have been too many. But those losses came when I was young. I didn't process them in an adult way.
With Al Gore in 2000, it was different. I was old enough then to understand that the assault on Gore was an assault on me, too.
The shock and outrage I feel today have the same quality as the emotions that wracked me over the 2000 presidential election in which the Bush goons swarmed over Florida and effectively murdered democracy (aided and abetted by the Supreme Court, yes).
Now we're watching the media gorge themselves on the feast of a non-celebrity-focused Real News Event. CNN's Airhead America ramps up, Don Lemon effuses, "Oooh, lookie! See our monitors! Newsrooms all over the world are on this story!" (If there is any stupider news anchor on the air today, I don't know who it is.)
The Pakistani people had their democracy assassinated today. Ours was taken out in 2000. Al Gore still lives -- an admirable life -- as a human being. But our President Gore, whom we elected, was eliminated by thugs, true believers who don't like democracy all that much when their guy doesn't win.
As I watch George W. Bush try to say something meaningful about Bhutto's murder, I am disgusted with him all over again. This is what it means to have no moral authority. When I see Bush on the teevee on a day like today, I don't associate him with the Pakistani people, but rather with the forces who are willing to "take out" an opponent rather than live with democracy's outcomes.
[The poll below is just my way of blowing off the steam coming out of my ears when I watch CNN's sensationalist and, in some cases, childish coverage.]