On the occasion of her one-month birthday, La Russophobe bestows some Russophelia. Well, kind of.

During the controversial election of 2000, many people claimed that George Bush had not "really" been elected president since his rival, Al Gore, got more popular votes than Bush, who only prevailed by a whisker in the Electoral College.

What those people, who were mostly Democrats, failed to mention was that in 2000 George Bush received a much larger share of the popular vote than Democrat Bill Clinton had received in 1992, when Clinton only got the votes of 43% of those who went to the polls. In other words, 57% of those voting wanted somebody other than Clinton to become president; far more Americans wanted Bush to become president in 2000 than wanted Clinton to become president in 1992, yet Clinton still took the Oath of Office.

Election returns can be misleading, can't they? As can blind ideological rhetoric.

Another example is Vladimir Putin.

In 2004, Putin allegedly (that is, according to Russian official records) received 48,931,376 votes for president or 71.2% of the votes that were cast.

Obviously, the idea that the elections were genuine is utterly refuted by the 70%+ tally in a country where the average income is $300 and the population is expected to reduce by 1/3 in the next 50 years. Russia has more than enough serious problems to make any"real" election an extreme nail biter (unless of course you believe that Russia is a nation of mindless sheep with only one opinion, that fed to them by the Kremlin), yet Putin won in a landslide. Putin did not participate in debates or meaningful interviews. The election was criticized for fraud by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Id.

Only 64.4% of Russia's eligible voters went to the polls in the 2004 election (about 66 million people in a country of 145 million). Putin thus received 71.2% of 64.4% of the eligible vote in Russia, or 45.9.% of the support of the eligible voters if we assume the election was 100% clean. Since we know it was dirty from the bald claim that 70% of a country in such dire straits could possibly want a man with a secret resume to be president, Putin's total was obviously even lower than that.

In other words, in 2004 54.1% of Russians rejected Putin's candidacy, at least to the extent of not voting for it. 28.8% of those who voted cast a vote against Putin, and 3.5% of those voting chose the ever-popular "none of the above;" they travelled all the way to the polling place just to express the idea that the entire process was an obscene sham. To these Russians, La Russophobe raises a stakan of vodka and says: THREE CHEERS FOR YOU!! You are true Russian patriots. Millions of others, less worthy of credit, simply stayed at home; but at least they were not actively complicit.

Nonetheless, if anyone asks "why are you a Russophobe?" probably the neatest, most succinct answer is to reply: 45.9. When they ask what that means, you say that as high as that share of the Russian population was willing to cast its vote for a proud KGB spy conducting a bloody unsuccessful war while the national economy languishes at the level of a third-world state and the population rapidly erodes, only ten years after the USSR collapsed due to the fact that the KGB killed more Russians than all of Russia's enemies combined.

Still, that doesn't mean the minority isn't worth fighting for. After all, it was only a minority of courageous Americans who opposed the legalization of slavery in the U.S. Constitution, but in the end those people turned into a majority and now the Constitution reads the way they wanted it to all along.

So the question of russophobia boils down to the question of just which "russo" we're talking about . . . the cowardly, lazy, racist majority or the courageous, brilliant, magnificent minority. And for today, maybe only today, we're talking about the minority.

TO YOUR HEALTH, MINORITY!!