Player Elimination: do you believe we are all winners just for showing up? If yes: stop being a moron. If no: have yourself a cookie. You are correct.
Oh gawd...this is so totally not the issue here with elimination as a mechanic. The point is that in a MULTIPLAYER BOARD GAME the goal should be to facilitate fun and interaction, not determine who is the winner and who are the losers. Yes, there needs to be a winner and competition is essential. But what's the point of eliminating the people you are socializing with? It's not a one on one thing, it's not a sporting event where there is a winner and a loser and various degrees of performance per individual affecting that outcome. It's a board game. If you care so much about winning that you don't care if your friend or family member is out of the game, then you and I play board games for very different reasons.
One on one games are 100% elimination games and that is how it should be. Binary winner and loser outcome. In certain kinds of games, like Wiz-War, elimination is essential to the concept of the game. But in most multiplayer conflict games, elimination is an outdated and fundamentally flawed concept. The funny thing is that there really aren't that many games that actually have literal elimination- Titan is the only one that springs to mind since Diplomacy is more about effective or assumed elimination. I guess Risk has it, but who keeps playing after somebody goes down? And the newer, better editions have victory conditions instead of "play until someone takes over every territory" crap. So the rah-rah for elimination is kind of silly anyway. it's just like some kind of weird macho flag some folks like to fly, I guess.
It's not a "politically correct" thing, it's not some kind of bizarre Communist plot dreamed up by liberals. Obama has nothing to do with it.