Expressing Opinions

Today I was doing some online reading and came across Push Polling in South Carolina — Who’s It Really Helping? on Wired News. It was interesting to read about some of some of the dirty tricks the Republican party is engage in to corrupt the election process, such as hiring an actor with the voice of an angry black man to intimidate white people. Talk about playing the race card and bigotry.

In “How to Rig an Election,” Raymond recounts how Dick Zimmer, a former Republican congressman from New Jersey, hired political consultants to help him with a bid to unseat incumbent Democrat Rush Holt.
One tactic was to “get a Green Party candidate named Carl Mayer on the ballot to suck single-issue voters away from Holt.” The other was to hire an actor with the voice of “an angry black man,” record a pro-Holt message and target those calls to Eastern European white voters living in New Jersey. Raymond wrote: “The message was, ‘I’m a ghetto black guy calling you, racist Ukrainian guy, and scaring the crap out of you because you probably think that if you don’t vote for the Democrat I’m going to come to your house and take care of some business.’”

“We wanted the message heard only by those people whose reaction would be ‘I’m not voting for Holt because he uses scary black men to call my house,” the passage concluded. And that was just one version of the race-baiting tactic they used, in one demographic.

I know these are examples of Republican dirty deeds and I am sure the Democrats do their share too. It makes my stomach turn when I hear the politicians say voter turn out is important, when it appears they should be saying only come out to vote if you are voting for me or for someone who will divide the votes of my opponent so I can win.

I know it sounds naive, but it would be nice when I meet a politician I don’t feel like I am meeting a used car salesman. Because I can always tell when both are lying, their lips are moving.

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