Sodomy (Who’sSane?)  was unamimously elected with nary a dissenting vote in Iraq’s  11-million ballots-cast charade yesterday.  I think we can trust him concerning his reports on Iraq’s production and intended use of deadly offensive weaponry as much as we should rely on him to oversee and report upon a fair election, don’t you?  

Actually, I’d like to see the Sniper of D.C. ( to the tune of “The Barber of Seville”) apprehended and installed as the dictator of Iraq in Sodomy’s stead.  Maybe,like Buffalo Bill Cody shooting bison by railroad ride, he’d just spend his unlimited dictatorial powers hunting down the dozen or so look-alike Saddam-doppelgangers roaming the Iracky range. 

Or better yet:  Let’s just kidnap Saddam and force him to pump gas at a prominent locale in the D.C. area.  And make him sing the old Fred Allen Show commercial song: “You can trust your car to the general who wears the star, the big, bright, shoot-me-in-the-head star…”

Question: Who let the dogs out (woof, woof, woof, woof)  ??

Answer: 'Cry 'havoc,' and let loose the Chihuahuas of inconvenience.'

But despite this blight of Saddam and his *democracy*, I believe that democracy in the world today still does well!

Take, for instance, the democracy of Google.  “Google??”, you say, “That’s a friggin' search engine!”   True, but Google’s spellchecker is a democratic tool:

Google's self-learning spellchecker automatically detects misspellings and suggests corrections. Using technology developed by Google, it is far more accurate than industry standard software.

   --Google

Here’s how, (when I’m undecided about the spelling of a word that’s not first covered by WordXP’s native software dictionary engine),  I often cast my vote with the internet’s “informed democracy”:

1)      I have the ever-convenient, freely-downloadable Google toolbar loaded in my browser’s menu bar.

2)    I type in the word whose spelling I’m (and WordXP is) unsure of (e.g.,  Arnold Scharzzenegger  )

3)    I hit the Google tool’s search button and (typically) within a second (or less) I'm presented with only 3 hits for my spelling and the prompt: Did you mean:schwarzenegger 

4)    I click on schwarzenegger  and again, in about a second, am presented with 308,000 hits—clearly referencing Arnold.

5)    I vote with the majority and decide to correct my spelling to go along with Google’s suggestion and the 100,000:1 odds.

This whole scenario requires maybe 5 or 10 seconds and provides me with a *rule-informed democratic choice*  much more consistently and rapidly than researching the *correct spelling* would by any other means.

Even for a commonly misspelled word like “Carribean” , Google will return 221,000 hits and then prompt: Did you mean:caribbean  ?  Following that quick link, one finds that 4,777,000 hits spell it otherwise.  So in my mind, *otherwise* democratically rules!

Real linguists know that all languages *live*--and, in my estimation, sustaining such life through Googles’ “informed, democratic” spellchecker is as American as apple pye.