THE IOWA CAUCUS & THE MEDIA HAVE KEPT VOTERS FROM RECOGNIZING THE REAL ISSUES

...A 1950's American Voter Registration Poster





Voter ID laws, massive campaign contributions and the main-stream media not doing their jobs are the biggest and most important issues.

The current joke event called the Republican Iowa Caucus is really disturbing when what really matters is being ignored by both the voters and the main-stream press.

As an example, regardless of which GOP “wack-a-doodle” won the Iowa Caucus, where’s the concern that due to bogus voter ID laws, (Laws installed by Republican state lawmakers), 5 million voters, mainly Democrats, may be kept from voting next November?

In 2011, 14 states passed unnecessary laws making it harder for certain Americans, particularly minorities, the elderly and young people, to vote. This is the basic foundation of our American democracy, and the Republicans are working very hard to take it away.

The long-term GOP goal for 2012 is to keep traditional Democrats from casting ballots, and this has been their focus going all the way back to Ronald Reagan. Voters must now show government-issued IDs, of which more than 1 in 10 Americans currently lack. Some states have also ended or reduced early voting capabilities and same-day registration. And Florida has disenfranchised their citizens with criminal records, even if they have paid their debt to society and fulfilled their jail terms.

As another example, (and as expected), the “good ole boy” voters In Texas are allowed to offer a “concealed handgun license” as a sufficient form of voter identification. But if you are a bonified Texas university student with a valid student photo ID, that’s not good enough to be able to vote in Texas.

Based on their newly minted rules in Wisconsin, a voter without an ID needs a birth certificate to get a state issued ID. But a voter without a birth certificate needs a valid ID, such as a US Passport, to obtain a state issued ID. (And of course, it already takes a birth certificate to obtain a US Passport.)

In Tennessee, a 96-year-old African American woman who has been voting all of her adult life was denied a voter ID because she didn’t have a copy of her marriage license. (Her husband had passed away decades ago.) NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous has described these right-wing efforts in all 14 states as the “most coordinated attack on voting rights since the days of Jim Crow”.

But voter registration is not the only issue to be concerned about.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Economist and columnist for the New York Times describes what he calls today, “post-truth politics”.

This is the situation where the right-wing candidates can feel free to say whatever they want, (or the Super-PAC's ads can say it), regardless of whether it’s true, and they will not be held accountable by the press.

Oh, there may be some rare instances where a candidate is called out for saying something outright misleading. But for the most part, in order to not be cut off from communicating with the candidates, very few reporters today will risk their jobs by challenging a front-running GOP candidate. As Krugman has noted, “if past experience is any guide, most of the news media will feel as though their reporting must be ‘balanced.’” For too many main-stream journalists, to call out a Republican for lying requires them to also criticize a Democrat, making for a media-age of massive ‘false equivalency”.

In this new bizarro campaign world, GOP candidates will continue to say things that are “flatly, grossly, and shamefully untrue".

The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne described it honestly, without fear of retribution, as he gave these examples. “Obama has traveled the world and apologized for America,” says Romney. But that’s totally untrue. “The stimulus created zero jobs,” says Rick Perry, while it actually created or saved at least 3 million jobs. “Obama is going to put free enterprise on trial,” claims Romney, while nearly 3 million private-sector jobs were created under Obama policies over the past 20 months?

But in today’s “no challenge media era”, Romney, Perry, Gingrich, Paul, Bachmann, Huntsman or Santorum, none of them will have to deal with the press on any or all of their untrue statements.

And today, with all the Citizens-United undisclosed investments into the GOP campaign coffers, these “un-truth campaigns” will get much worse before they “may” or “may not” get any better. More than ever, the average American voter must take the time to qualify what the candidates claim, especially if the statements are from of a GOP candidate.

It's been almost 100 years since America’s democracy has been in this much potential of disappearing and/or from American voter's ability to rescue it.

As compared to the Iowa Caucus, this is certainly “no joke”.

Copyright G.Ater 2012

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