Thursday, September 20, 2012

Political Ads, why believe anything they say?

Let’s get this out of the way upfront, my political views don’t count. American politics is a closed book to me. Not because I want nothing to do with it, but because for a legal alien like me it is an offence to vote or attempt to register to vote in a federal election punishable by deportation.

Non-U.S. citizens, including permanent residents (green card holders), who vote, or register to vote, in a federal election also can be denied naturalization and/or removed (deported) from the United States.

That comes directly from uscis.gov. I checked my facts before writing this post in case anything had changed.

Apparently the people who put political ads together, especially the new breed of attack ads don’t. I’ll give you an example, a democractic candidate was redistricted out of his seat by the republicans (we’re in Utah they bleed red). He is now running against a republican for a senate seat and this is where it gets dirty. In his ad he says he voted against the stimulus and voted to repeal Obamacare. In the attack ad the republicans say he voted for those measures. Someone’s lying, and seeing as it’s on the democrat’s website I’m say it’s not him.

So that’s local politics what about the highest office in the land? Policiticans are slippery creatures, there’s that old joke ‘how can you tell if a politician’s lying?’ the answer being ‘his lips are moving’. Which you could apply to pundits on CNN and Fox News but let’s not go there. And this being Utah if we get onto church and state we’ll be here all day.

Pretty speeches are one thing but in my view actions don’t speak louder than words. Words are powerful, words are also recorded and it’s amazing how often you can get a candidate to argue with themselves because they held the opposing viewpoint when their party was in power. Once a flip-flopper… Name a president who hasn’t made more than one mistake during their terms. It’s not the mistakes it’s how the CIC reacts to them, but we’re getting off topic here.

Political ads, superpac ads, attack ads just use the mute button and go to FactCheck.org you can even ask questions about specific statements made by democrats or republicans.

As I said at the top of this post, my vote doesn’t count, but here’s something to make you think. Cos you’re thinking that back home, where I could vote, I voted labour (democrat) right? Wrong! In England my voting record was 100% conservative (republican) but english republicans are nothing like the ones they breed in the US.