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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (12056)	7/14/2004 12:46:33 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

This must be another essential security measure to protect us from terrorism: Two Arrested At Bush July 4 Speech For Anti-Bush T-Shirts A Texas couple was charged with trespassing on the Fourth of July for wearing anti-Bush t-shirts at a speech given by the president in West Virginia. Although the couple, Nicole and Jeffrey Rank, had tickets to the event, security insisted they leave or stand in a designated protest zone. When they refused, police detained them. From the stage Bush said, "We're thankful that this nation they created 228 years ago remains free and independent and the best hope for all mankind."

To: Dale Baker who wrote (12056)	7/16/2004 8:53:21 PM
From: Czechsinthemail	Respond to of 20773

The problem with BS rhetoric is that it is so widely disseminated and so little scrutinized by those exposed to it, that the Orwellian doublespeak is adopted and passed around as gospel. The tendency to parrot BS rather than cut through it has unfortunately become a hallmark of American electoral politics along with low rates of active participation. Maybe this time the frustration will be strong enough to mobilize people, but the influence of Frank Luntz and others on finding ways of packaging, naming and labeling that distort and distract from substantive content in an attempt to put a happy face on horrible policies and make the toxic tolerable -- essentially it is a strategy of shaping understanding and attitude by naming and labeling with the expectation that most people will never look beneath the surface to understand the real content or look around to understand a larger context of meaning. Here is a site dedicated to the issue of "Luntzspeak": luntzspeak.com Without an active and critical press and a public dedicated to learning, discerning, and revealing the truth, there is a tendency for fog to rule rather than clarity. If journalists don't take it upon themselves to point out the discrepancies between name and content or what political figures say and what they do, and instead they simply pass along the PR messages like emptyheaded advertising conduits, I'm not sure people will smell their way through to the truth no matter how gross the PR distortions. Though we can always hope that common sense will prevail, the sophisticated propaganda campaign designed to hide and obscure the truth using convenient images and sound bytes combined with a citizenry that will go to great lengths to keep themselves insulated from disturbing truths yields a stubborn inertial factor that has to be overcome for meaningful change to occur. The other factor is the tendency to shift the discussion from substantive policy issues such as the economy and foreign policy to obsess over cultural and personal characterizations. Widespread references to any opposition to Bush economic policy as "class warfare" and political dissent against the Iraq war as "hate speech" tend to obscure the meaning of the words. Similarly, when Democrats are called "elite liberals" (which they may be), it tends to divert discussion from the more substantive issue of policies and politics designed to serve economic elites, who have prospered disproportionately from an increasing transfer of wealth toward the smallest percentages at the top of our economic pyramid. Is Bush more a man of the people simply because adopts a "Faux Bubba" style where he mispronounces words like "nuclear" and is the only one of his father's children to sport a Texas accent than Kerry who sounds like he actually graduated from Yale? Does wrapping himself in the flag and acting like Joe NASCAR make Bush more a man of the people, notwithstanding tax policies that favor the wealthy while increasing the relative burden on poor and middle class people, than Kerry who has proposed reversing them? As for polls, the bizarre nature of the American electoral system means that the key polls are local and designed to interpret and influence the responses of voters in the key electoral swing states. I was told (but haven't been able to confirm) that micro-politics had extended to which National Guard and Reserve units get called up for service in Iraq: apparently units from the so-called "battleground states" are less likely to be called up to the real battleground in Iraq while those from states designated electorally in the bag or lost get to go. Rather than waste time, energy and political airspace -- not to mention further polarizing the American public -- trying to deny marriage status to gays, I would appreciate seeing some of the Washingtonios backing an amendment to bring the electoral college to an end. Beyond the problems demonstrated in the 2000 election in which the candidate opposed by most voters came into office and proclaimed a popular mandate, our electoral process produces truly strange and dysfunctional election campaigns and too often undemocratic results. Not only are they more susceptible to distortion by money and local politicos (like the Republican tag team of Brother Bush and Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000), campaigns that are locally focused on relatively few citizens in relatively few states effectively turning them into a special interest constituency. The electoral college is a bad joke that undermines the credibility of the United States every time we claim to be the champions of free, fair and democratic elections. While we are at it, we might take steps toward a system with instant runoff or more proportional representation to get past our obsession with winner-take-all results that too frequently result in government that simply isn't of, by, or for the people.