Don Firth, you said this so well it bears repeating:

" ... Only in a dictatorship do things happen immediately.

[Some people display irrational impatience] while at the same time revealing their lack of understanding of the way a democracy works.

They want a particular agenda passed, and when the party that promises that agenda actually gains a tiny majority in Congress on a Tuesday (election day), if they haven't delivered the whole package by Wednesday noon, some folks have a purple-faced hissy-fit and want to form a lynch mob.

When there is significant opposition, you have to negotiate, persuade, and wheel and deal. You can't just issue a peremptory order and have it happen.   Caligula could. Constantine could. Napoleon could. Hitler could. Kim Jung Il can.

But Nancy Pelosi can't.

And Cindy Sheehan wouldn't be able to either!

..."
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akenaton , Bill D said it well. Cindy Sheehan is not likely to stop the carnage in Iraq much sooner than the Dems currently in Congress are doing, even if she did get elected.   (And, oh, by the way, why couldn't Cindy work her legislative magic just as well, or even better, if she replaced a Republican?    You still haven't answered why it would be better for Cindy to take down a Democrat than a neocon Republican.)   But she's as likely to bring about the loss of Pelosi's seat to a Republican ( by splitting the liberal/Democratic vote ) as she is to actually get elected.

And you don't have to be a "pseudo-intellectual" to realize that some of the other mischief the Bush-Cheney administration (abetted by the Roberts-Thomas-Scalia-Alito bloc on the SCOTUS and the Republican-heavy Congress) has been up to will result in misery and death for far more people in the not-so-long run if people of good will focus on the Iraq occupation to the exclusion of all other issues.   If the broad powers that this administration has hijacked, in violation of the US Constitution, remain unchallenged, we are headed -- soon -- for a virtual dictatorship or quasi-feudal corporatocracy (fascism) plus the devastation of what makes our planet habitable for humans.