The purpose of this post is not to place anybody in a bad light, nor is it to start a fight. I only want to attempt to put things in perspective, if only for myself. Yesterday morning, as I was going through my email, I came across an email from the American Family Association. I've been on their email list for years. Sometimes they put out interesting updates or let me know about issues I hadn't heard of before. At other times, they seem alarmist and silly. One time, they wanted to call for a boycott of a certain company. I can't remember if it was Comcast or DirectTV, but the commercial dealt with things being pulled toward the TV and the characters in the commercial would make statements like "Our cable sucks!" I personally thought it was funny, and didn't see it as damaging to my children, so I deleted their email asking me to call whichever company and complain.
Yesterday was one of those times when I got an email from AFA had to wonder what was going on. The email from AFA contained the subject line "Please vote! Our children's future depends on it!!" OK, that's fair and accurate enough. Voting is a serious duty of citizenship. People sacrificed, fought, and died so that we could go to the polls among other things, so we should vote. Nothing new here. The next line about caused me to spit my coffee out:
In my 70 years, I have never seen an election where coverage was so one-sided and biased or where censorship by the liberal media was so widely practiced and where media coverage was so slanted as I have seen in this election process. Their plan is working. The only chance conservatives have is to make sure they care enough to vote.
My first reaction was "Dude, where have you been the last several years?" At least back as far as 2000, media coverage has been one-sided, heavily biased, and blah, blah, blah. In the early days of our Republic (yes, folks, we're a republic. Check the history books. No "democracy" here, at least, not in the global sense) newspapers would square off between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, each one editorializing for it's favorite politician and biasing or censoring coverage of the other. Do you think that in the times surrounding our revolution, that Tory newspapers paid fair coverage to patriots, and do you expect that Thomas Paine provided fair coverage of British issues? Ben Franklin, among many of his talents and skills, was a newspaperman. Do you think that he didn't have opinions?
OK, let's put a few things in perspective. I have two points to make here.
1. There is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes is one of my favorite books. Written by Solomon at the end of his life of luxury, overindulgence, and idolatry, Solomon writes that there is nothing new under the sun. Let's look at that briefly. I have no idea where Solomon's politics would fall on our current scale. I don't know if he was a liberal or a conservative. I do know that he was heavily tax-and-spend. He built up a lot of infrastructure, conscripted labor and brought in slaves to build it all, and heavily burdened the populace through taxation to pay for it all. You can read the account of how the kingdom separated in civil war after his death when his apparently boneheaded son decided to play the "tough guy" in I Kings and II Chronicles. When it came to women, Solomon made former President Clinton look like an amateur with 700 wives and 300 concubines. If there were an entertainment press in Solomon's day, he apparently would have kept it fully employed.
2. We're only electing a President
I'm seriously wondering how so many people with so many fingers stuck half-assedly into politics can be so naive and uninformed about how things work and how things are supposed to work. OK, perhaps I'm not as knowledgeable about how things actually works as I'm supposed to be, but I've done some research into how things are supposed to work. I've written before about how we're not electing a Messiah. I don't know why we have to turn a Presidential election into a Star Wars scale battle of good and evil. If we elect the "right" man, he'll save us all and restore our Republic to it's "former" glory and we'll all live in the promised land. If we elect the "wrong" man, he'll enslave us all and destroy our land.
There is a reason why our Republic was created with three separate but equal branches of government: because the founders knew what would happen if the "wrong" man got in charge of it all. Our federal system of government was created to be able to survive an idiot President, a moronic Congress, and an activist Supreme Court, even all at the same time.
I'm not impressed with either McCain or Obama, but like it or not, one of these two men will be President, unless something a whole lot worse than one of them happens. I'll say that both men impress me with their words, but their records do not back up their words. I think when it comes to election day, I'll just write Ron Paul's name on the ballot. That satisfies my civic duty to vote, but absolves me of being forced to make a choice between two unsatisfactory choices. I thought about writing my own name in, even though I don't stand a chance of being elected, but then I realized that I'm not qualified to be President. I'm only 34. If you don't know how old I would have to be to qualify as President, you seriously need to read our Constitution and get some perspective as to how things are supposed to work. You can read it for free anywhere, but I've done the work of finding it for you here.
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