Another Good Reason to Lie
President Bush will have to tell some lies out there on the campaign trail to hide this news:
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000006&sid=a7Af_f_cXkW0&refer=home
I was thinking yesterday about politics while I was busy gathering firewood and it dawned on me more than it ever has before that politics, especially at the national level, is a game and as in all games, you can play fair or you can cheat. The thing is, there are very few actual rules to stop politicians from cheating. The public actually expects politicians to cheat.
But there is a bit of a double standard in US politics. Members of the Democratic Party are supposed to play the game straight. When they cheat or lie or even when there is an appearance that they might have cheated or lied, Republicans and the conservative media point out to the public that someone cheated. Somehow the public has come to the idea that Democrats should play the game of politics straight, that there is an expected standard of honesty for the Democratic Party.
However, there seems to be no standard at all when it comes to the Republican Party. Nobody is monitoring them. There really is no liberal mainstream media reporting on Republican lies and cheats and dirty politics. The mainstream media just doesn't dare to do it and the fringe left has only a weak voice in the media. The conservative right has voices all over the radio dial plus Fox News, but the left has almost nothing. On how many radio stations throughout America do you hear Amy Goodman? Not many. On how many do you hear Rush Limbaugh? Lots!!
So while Rush and all of his friends hold the Democrats to a higher standard, almost nobody is holding the Republicans in line. The result is that nearly all of the dirty politics on the national scale have come from Republicans. In fact, the Republicans have a whole war chest of dirty tricks and dirty tricksters for hire and have been running campaigns this way since the days of Richard Nixon. Conservative media won't report it and nobody in the mainstream media dares to report about it.
What the Boston Globe and Michael Moore did with respect to George Bush's National Guard service wasn't dirty politics despite the Republican and conservative media response. George Bush has been keeping a secret since 1972 which if exposed would cause him political embarrassment. The Globe and Moore have been trying to bring that secret to the surface, but Bush has effectively kept it suppressed. This is politics - even negative politics - but it isn't dirty politics to try to expose the truth.
What the Swift Boat vets for Bush did is dirty politics, using lies and clever deceit to smear the reputation of an opponent. That is playing the game dirty. That is using the cheats.
We need to know what kind of man we are voting for. If George Bush used political favoritism to get a safe job in the military during wartime, if he used favoritism and asked others to do the fighting for him, and if despite the enormous break he was given, he still spent months of his enlistment neglecting his responsibility, and if ever since then he has used power to cover up what he did, shouldn't we know about that? If Bush is that kind of man, shouldn't we know?
The double standard is this, though. Democrats have to use the truth. Republicans can use lies. The whole country knows it too. The whole country knows that Democrats expect the truth from their elected representatives while Republicans hold their representatives to no such standard.
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000006&sid=a7Af_f_cXkW0&refer=home
I was thinking yesterday about politics while I was busy gathering firewood and it dawned on me more than it ever has before that politics, especially at the national level, is a game and as in all games, you can play fair or you can cheat. The thing is, there are very few actual rules to stop politicians from cheating. The public actually expects politicians to cheat.
But there is a bit of a double standard in US politics. Members of the Democratic Party are supposed to play the game straight. When they cheat or lie or even when there is an appearance that they might have cheated or lied, Republicans and the conservative media point out to the public that someone cheated. Somehow the public has come to the idea that Democrats should play the game of politics straight, that there is an expected standard of honesty for the Democratic Party.
However, there seems to be no standard at all when it comes to the Republican Party. Nobody is monitoring them. There really is no liberal mainstream media reporting on Republican lies and cheats and dirty politics. The mainstream media just doesn't dare to do it and the fringe left has only a weak voice in the media. The conservative right has voices all over the radio dial plus Fox News, but the left has almost nothing. On how many radio stations throughout America do you hear Amy Goodman? Not many. On how many do you hear Rush Limbaugh? Lots!!
So while Rush and all of his friends hold the Democrats to a higher standard, almost nobody is holding the Republicans in line. The result is that nearly all of the dirty politics on the national scale have come from Republicans. In fact, the Republicans have a whole war chest of dirty tricks and dirty tricksters for hire and have been running campaigns this way since the days of Richard Nixon. Conservative media won't report it and nobody in the mainstream media dares to report about it.
What the Boston Globe and Michael Moore did with respect to George Bush's National Guard service wasn't dirty politics despite the Republican and conservative media response. George Bush has been keeping a secret since 1972 which if exposed would cause him political embarrassment. The Globe and Moore have been trying to bring that secret to the surface, but Bush has effectively kept it suppressed. This is politics - even negative politics - but it isn't dirty politics to try to expose the truth.
What the Swift Boat vets for Bush did is dirty politics, using lies and clever deceit to smear the reputation of an opponent. That is playing the game dirty. That is using the cheats.
We need to know what kind of man we are voting for. If George Bush used political favoritism to get a safe job in the military during wartime, if he used favoritism and asked others to do the fighting for him, and if despite the enormous break he was given, he still spent months of his enlistment neglecting his responsibility, and if ever since then he has used power to cover up what he did, shouldn't we know about that? If Bush is that kind of man, shouldn't we know?
The double standard is this, though. Democrats have to use the truth. Republicans can use lies. The whole country knows it too. The whole country knows that Democrats expect the truth from their elected representatives while Republicans hold their representatives to no such standard.
posted by Bill | 5:47 AM
2 Comments:
"But there is a bit of a double standard in US politics. Members of the Democratic Party are supposed to play the game straight. When they cheat or lie or even when there is an appearance that they might have cheated or lied, Republicans and the conservative media point out to the public that someone cheated. Somehow the public has come to the idea that Democrats should play the game of politics straight, that there is an expected standard of honesty for the Democratic Party."
You're absolutely crazy. I grew up in the most liberal, democratic area of Texas and the Democrats were known for stealing names off of headstones to fill the voter registrations. If you do a university level study focusing on the corruption of both parties then the Democratic party far exceeds the Republican, not becuase the Republicans are more virtuous, but because the Dems are more numerous. The Dems were always the theives, just like in 2000. But then again I don't live in Maine. Your entire post reeks of someone who hasn't traveled much. There is more to live than Fox News.
Oh, that was me. www.smootherthanbutter.com
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