Recently, I was listening to one of the local conservative talk radio stations and I heard a couple of lies the right wants you to believe. They are not true, though, and knowing about the lies the politicians will tell you is an important step in voting intelligently. Don’t vote for a party – vote for a candidate. Make sure you know enough about the people for whom you vote. The worst thing you can do is vote for someone based on their party affiliation when you don’t know anything about them.
And before I get complaints about not giving equal time to the liberal lies, let me point out that:
- There are probably too many of them for me to cover and still write about other things on my site
- I haven’t listened to liberal talk radio recently enough to even know what lies the left is spreading
Rest assured, when I hear lies from the left that I can quickly point out, I will.
First up, there is talk in Ohio that the (leading in the polls) Democratic governor candidate Ted Strickland knowingly hired and kept on his staff a sex offender. First, please ignore the unfortunate wording which mentions keeping the offender on his staff. This charge was first brought up in the Democratic primaries by Strickland’s Democratic rival for the nomination. At that time, the charges were investigated and disproved. Seemingly forgotten, the charges were again raised by Republican Ken Blackwell during the final debate between the two. Blackwell is trailing badly in the polls, and must be looking for any way to help his numbers.
Since raising that rumor again hasn’t helped enough (presumably because enough people now know the rumor to be false), Blackwell followed up the next day with claims that Strickland is gay and treated his “boy boy” aide to a private retreat in Italy back in 1998. Both claims look to be an attempt to tie Strickland in to the negative response coming from the Foley scandal.
I know that since my only 2 regular readers are in Tennessee (hi, Tim and Priness Di) with a possible 3rd reader in Pennsylvania (Hello, Dead Lights) this story doesn’t seem to matter. Truthfully, most folks I know probably don’t care about the Ohio election. However, I feel that lies from politicians need to be pointed out when possible. I don’t do it nearly as often as I would like, but that is something I intend to work on being better about.
The other lie coming out right now is a claim that voting for a Democrat will result in a reduction in intelligence spending like that used to stop the London terrorist attacks. You probably remember those attacks – a number of terrorists planned an unlikely liquid bomb attack against planes headed for the United States with intentions of bringing them down while over the ocean.
This lie is more insidious, because it is partially cloaked in truth. The claim that voting Democrat will almost certainly result in a reduction in intelligence spending in the US. However, one of the reasons for this is the Democrats are now trying to get the numbers necessary to stop President Bush from performing illegal wiretaps on Americans. The reduction in spending targets that program especially.
But the real lie in the story is the implication that this illegal spying on Americans helped stop the London terrorist attacks. The truth is, US government officials did not even know about the planned attacks until after the British intelligence service had been found out about the plans and had been tracking the terrorists for months. Illegally spying on Americans played no part in the stopping the attacks, as we only found out about them after the British informed American government officials.
The terrorists were caught due to human intelligence – an agent had infiltrated their ranks and passed information back to the British government about the plans in time to track and thwart them. All the US government did in the planned attacks was pressure the British government to stop and arrest the terrorists before they were actually ready to try the attacks. I’ll always wonder if this didn’t cause some terorrists to get away because they weren’t involved in the test run flights when the captured terrorists were taken.
I also want to point out as shameful the Sean Hannity radio program, as I heard both these lies spread without rebuttal on his conservative talk show last week.
[tags]Lies from the right, Politicians are lying to us again[/tags]