Well, did you stomach all of this?

Where should I start? For instance, no matter if it’s head or tails, we will have a religious president; whereas, those who are holding on to Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu had difficulty adapting to Turgut Özal, one of our former presidents. I guess it is an issue of being able to stomach the lesser of two evils.

Have you been able to digest the fact that those who could not even accept Turgut Özal, even after he died, are now regarding Ekmeleddin Bey as an easy to digest bite?

Likewise, how do you view that some writers from the conservative community approach the Ekmeleddin Bey incident with quite a naïve stance?

That these same writers are extremely joyful the opposition has nominated a person from their own world, instead of from one of the politically and mentally separate worlds?

They present the case as if it were “a victory of conservative Turkey and normalization.”

Also, are you not curious, meanwhile, what has happened to political rivalry? In what kind of desperateness have the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) given up their political ideals in their minds and the candidate profile in their hearts? How can the central left policy collapse with the joint candidate project by imitating the central right and contradicting its own line? Also, the fact that they do not even care a bit that this collapse means an obituary in terms of democratic diversity and pluralism… 

On the contrary, that they are feel an ultimate pleasure and satisfaction that the opposition has adopted the line of the government, that they could not find any other way but to resemble the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) to cope with it…  

On the other hand, to everybody’s surprise, the anti-AK Party segments regard the individual they will elect as president as “the lesser evil of the pious…”

How do you think they are able to openly regard piousness as evil and continue to demonize conservatism? And on the other hand, they are creating all kinds of excuses to ask for votes, though unwillingly, saying Ekmeleddin Bey is “the more moderate of the evil…”

Also, for instance, don’t you find it strange that they are able to ask you to select an individual as president, whose name they continue to find peculiar?

And they are not able to say it straight away, without bloopers, hesitation, without skipping letters, in one go, without any accidents pronounce “Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu.”

Also, in their first pronunciation trials that even MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli and CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu could not do it smoothly without trashing some sound in the name… And the presidential election race is becoming more of a recitation and diction incident…

Or, for instance, doesn’t it bother you that when you say something against the Iraqi Shiite Arab nationalist Nouri al-Maliki, the reply may come from certain circles who speak in the name of our Alevi citizens?

Likewise, how do you stomach the fact that when you criticize the Salafi Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), that certain segments take it personally on behalf of the rebelling Sunni tribes in Iraq and react?   

Or, in the Balyoz (Sledgehammer) case, why are some of us sad that everything, including false evidence, questionable digital data, irregular trials, that rain fell on the just and the unjust alike, that a parallel staffing was conducted within the Turkish Armed Forces, etc., that all these conspiracies have been turned down in the Constitutional Court and a door has been opened for a fair re-trial?
Have you been able to stomach all this?