If This is Cordial, then What the Hell Was Last Year Like?
The Daily Cal has repeatedly referred to how kind and pleasant everything was during ASUC elections. Here is the subheadline from a recent article, "Judicial Council Must Hear Remaining Suits of Unusually Cordial Year".

Do you consider it cordial when (this list is what I can think up off the top of my head, in roughly chronological order):
1. A former member of Student Action made a decidely non-cordial exit from the party, and they traded insults back and forth in Daily Cal articles. That former member then had talks with people planning on running with both Student Action and SQUELCH!, who decided not run with those parties after those conversations. (I'm sure only nice cordial things were said.) This upset someone in Student Action enough that I think he probably would have wanted to resort to violence if given the opportunity.
2. An executive candidate made threats against the attorney general (claiming the AG had slept with an underage girl) in an attempt to intimidate him.
3. The Election Council was so harrassed during the general candidates meeting that a member of the council ended up in tears before the night was over.
4. The BU Party was stripped from the ballot, leading to threats of federal lawsuits against the ASUC during the general candidates meeting and all throughout the campaign.
5. Accusations were made by people involved in the elections against other candidates and "the press" [i.e. me] to cause all sorts of damage to them (physical or otherwise) and someone's car was egged during the Daily Cal ASUC Candidate Forum.
6. An executive candidate at the ASUC forum announced that he had slept with another candidate's girlfriend.
7. Last minute lawsuits led to the removal of two referenda from the ballot, which prompted graduate student's calls for vengeance, in some of the angriest speeches I have ever seen given before the Senate. The Senate then held an impeachment hearing against a member of the Judicial Council and only narrowly acquitted her.
8. An angry Presidential candidate then proceeded to barricade himself into the Senate chambers to protest his disqualification, and was subsequently arrested. When he attempted to attend the appeal of his disqualification, he was barred from entering campus by police because of a restraining order the university had against him.
9. During slating, there was also apparently accusations that a member of the Sikh community was a misogynist (or something, people were being snippy in comments, and I couldn't really follow the story).
10. There was also an entire blog devoted to asserting the insanity of an executive candidate, and documenting various things he did.

Now granted, I don't expect the Daily Cal to find out about stuff like this. To them, the (not so) secret agreements between Student Action and CalSERVE not to file election lawsuits against each other apparently makes it a cordial election season. [And I'm sure there is plenty of other non-cordial stuff from this year that I'm forgetting (oh yeah, that whole thing with the death threats...), or that I didn't know about in the first place.] Please, no more articles referring to this as an "unusually cordial year".Email This Post!