Overzealous Afghanistan Elections

I'm not exactly sure what biggers news is currently out there, except perhaps the finger pointing of Hurricane Katrina, but Afghanistan recently had their first parliamentary elections in 30 years. People braved an insurgent campaign of Taliban miscreants to vote, as they did in the last historic elections, and proved that democracy can really take root in this country if we can give them the security and time to institutionalize and legitimize it.

The Miami Herald's AP report (reg. req'd) includes this:

Some 12.4 million Afghans were registered to vote for the 249-seat lower house of parliament, or Wolesi Jirga, and 420 seats on 34 provincial assemblies. Nearly 5,800 candidates - including 582 women - were on the ballots.

A quarter of the seats being voted on were reserved for women, who make up more than 42 percent of registered voters.

The more than 6,000 polling stations were guarded by about 100,000 Afghan police and soldiers and 30,000 foreign troops in the U.S.-led coalition and a separate NATO peacekeeping force.

Enthusiasm ran high.

"Today is a magnificent day for Afghanistan," said Ali Safar, 62, standing in line to vote in Kabul. "We want dignity, we want stability and peace.

Ironically, I first found the news buried on the BBC webpage. And I mean buried. I think we need to give the Afghanis some credit here. I like what I'm seeing here, mostly because of two things:

1. I rarely hear anything about Afghanistan these days. Since the liberal media is quite effective in trying to find chinks in the President's armor, especially where wars are concerned, our fight there must be working. These millions are far closer to the promised liberation than the Iraqis are, but they will, of course, end up in the same place.

2. When the media does report on Afghanistan, it's almost always positive and BURIED in their papers and websites. Some people actually don't think there's an overall liberal bias in the media, but if they'd just bother to check the location of pages... it may have something to do, also, with a bias toward violence, catchy stuff, whatever, but there's no denying the severe bias which has only grown worse while Bush has been in office when you consider things like this story.

And I'm sick of it. This is an amazing story that we should be cheering regardless of party registration.

Hopefully we can cheer a similarly important step towards freedom with the historic election of Angela Merkel in Germany later today.