kid playing with the loaded gun

it's only days before turkey hails its 12th president. of one dozen chiefs of the nation, only a few were elected rather than "approved" by the grand national assembly. turgut özal's ascent to the position was rather tumultuous, süleyman demirel's less so; but none raised a ruckus like tayyib bey's trials.

my opinion of the man is already obvious - he is not up to par for running anything bigger than a small black sea town and that only because it will keep him busy and out of much mischief.

however, under the current settings, tayyib bey -though i hate that it is so- has every right in the book to climb to çankaya, the seat of the top state job since atatürk. if a man is good enough to be premier, he is good enough to become president, too. if you are afraid that his somewhat pedestrian religious, political etc. standing is detrimental to the well being of the state and or the nation, you should have the democratic mechanisms, principles, practices and habits in place even before he started climbing the first rungs of the ladder. not having that, you tried to do it on the edge of a bayonet and the jab you gave him made him spring to the top.

the ongoing blast against tayyib bey's presidency is that if the top seat falls to the islamists, too, there will be nothing to check their controlled march toward sharia in turkey. sorry, but it was not tayyib bey who ordered this constitution or one of his fans who drafted it for the generals; nor were he or his cohorts in the assembly that passed it before the 92 percent majority of the voting public approved it for fear the generals would not leave if the bill was rejected. oh, the authors of the putsch had no real intention of leaving the helm anyway. with the constituiton in effect, some "general", not necessarily military, was supposed to eternally sit at çankaya and safeguard the holy state's interests against such malfeasants like commies or fundamenties. the whole idea then, exactly 25 years ago, was to prevent what is happening right now from happening!

it simply did not work out that way and now you got a kid playing with daddy's loaded gun in the hall!