However things get really complicated when quite sensible people discover that their wildest imaginings are true and that practically nothing that people they once trusted tell them is true.

If as a journalist you had tried to write the truth about the sinking of the USS Liberty, as we now know it, who would have believed you at the time and what would your job prospects have been?

Let me fix this for you:

“Ability to generalize on extremely low sampling rate seems to be a commmon trait among people.”

Due to my profession as a Russian-English interpreter I encounter this “view” very often. It has the easiest of explanations – these people do not know enough to make global generalizations. Ability to generalize on extremely low sampling rate seems to be a commmon trait among Russians. These are the same people that would buy the cheapest beer or bread and then complain that there is no good beer or decent bread in the US.

It is interesting that every Briton I have talked to about this replies exactly as above in suitably pitying tones for my lack of comprehension of how a model democracy works.
Having lived for some years within the division bell area and briefly worked in the House of Commons I am aware of how the British system operates. This in no way changes my view that it is grossly undemocratic for Tony Blair and the Queen to decide who the Prime Minister shall be even if he is the leader of the Labour Party. A modern democracy should have at its head a leader who has been elected by a majority of the voters like Sarkozy in France or dare I say it … Putin in Russia? I would not of course go so far as to suggest becoming like Bush in the United States.

As the great Scottish customs officer wrote “Oh, would that some power would give us the gift to see ourselves as others see us.”

In which connection I strongly recommend the comparison of Soviet and Western press coverage and justification of their respective invasions of Afghanistan by Nikolai Lanine and Media Lens. The similarity is eerie. http://www.medialens.org/ They start of quoting Pilger’s story “The writer Simon Louvish once told the story of a group of Soviets touring the United States before the age of glasnost. After reading the newspapers and watching TV, they were amazed to find that, on the big issues, all the opinions were the same. “In our country,” they said, “to get that result we have a dictatorship, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. So what’s your secret? How do you do it?”

Gordon Brown came to power because he became the leader of the party which won the last General Election. In the UK, the electorate do not vote for the Prime Minister, they vote for the party of government. The party of government then choose who from their ranks will be Prime Minister, usually the party leader. The party is free to change their leader at any point, and free to change Prime Minster at any point. Most people in the UK understand this basic principle, even if Muscovites don’t.

Rusia never had “uncontrolled Western style democracy”. I am altogether unclear on the “uncontrolled” part but western democracies are based on and are guaranteed by private property of means of production. Russia never had much of it yet, since it is still unclear where in many cases does the state end and private property begins. Russia did not buy “uncontrolled western style democracy” in 1990-s. It borrowed an idea, proceeded to corrupt it and now claims it did not work. It was not democracy that had not worked in Russia.

Currently Western democracy, or the “democratic game” as you call it, has only one real merit. At the moment in a stable society it permits a change of government without violence.

After living in the USSR, having looked out through the holes in the barbed wire fence, it is quite funny to see leftists in the West for whom democracy is nothing but a game or a facade. What you menion is not a sole merit, it is a possible measure of how advanced democracy is. Mexico just had the first case of “former” president that is not in exile (home or abroad) or in jail or isn’t dead. Russia has ways to go before it can catch up with Mexico. There are other minor and insignificant merits of democracy you might have missed while watching it as a game: freedom of speech might be one of them.