VOTER STUPIDITY - THE GOOD OLD STANDBY FANTASY

   

             by Neville Raymond

Let me count the ways in which they stick it to the voter.

First they engage in this fantastic charade that the fate of presidents and the destiny of free nations hangs upon a phantom species called the 'swing voter' - that is, a voter who is a victim of the paralysis of analysis and suffers from a difficulty of Hamlet-like proportions in making up his mind.  

Then they raise tampering with computerized voting into an art form, quietly using GOP operatives to flip the official vote count in order to put unpopular candidates into office.

Then they make-believe that there is such a thing as voter fraud and go around putting up all kinds of niggling roadblocks in the path of people exercising their democratic right to vote.

And when all else fails, there is this fantasy called Voter Stupidity.   
And that is the cruelest pretense of all - the pretense that the voter is just too downright dumb to make any intelligent choices.

Enter the Howard Stern gang to make the case for the blockhead American voter. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeJbOU4nmHQ 

I don't know if Howard Stern was crass enough to come up with this all on his own.  
Or if some well-funded dollar right wing think tank put him up to it.  
But there he is, peddling the brazen lie that the American voter does not know his rear orifice from a hole in the ground.  

And how does the Schlock Jock do it?  

By supposedly having one of his lapdogs run around collecting a series of gaffes and blunders from the proverbial man on the street.  

Is any of this for real?
For all I know, Stern could have hired actors to play the role of herculean know-nothings.  

Or his interviewer could gone through 99 voters who were relatively well-informed, or at least quite angrily articulate and crystal-clear about kitchen-table issues, in order to find that one special case who shows off to the greatest effect the efficacy of an education system that is determined to dumb down the American electorate.  

Nobody can say for sure.     

But here’s something we can be 100% sure about.

Voters by and large are not a stupid group.  

Right-wing oligarchs can pray and wish all day long that that were not true.  

It would certainly save them a heap of time and trouble.  

Come to think of it, it would save them a monumental bundle of money.  

They wouldn’t have to sink millions of millions of untraceable dollars trying to talk voters out of their unerring gut instincts. 

They wouldn’t have to mount thousands of slanted political ads trying to distort and befuddle the mind of voters until they no longer know which end is up and wind up voting against their own best interests. 

They wouldn’t have to put on an elaborate media show to get the voter to believe that he has a choice between two candidates who, to one degree or another, faithfully hew to a party line which is to strip  99% of Americans of their jobs, their homes, their right to affordable health care, a college education for their kids and a decent life, in order to boost welfare payments to a corporate state that enables the fortunate 1% to just keep on buying up more and more of the world.

No, the problem is not that the voter is stupid. 

It is that the voter is too smart for his own good.  

It is that he knows what he wants all too well.  

He knows that he wants to restore America's manufacturing base.  

He knows that he wants collective bargaining for workers.  

He knows that he wants to put the regulatory cop back on the Wall Street beat.  

He knows that he wants to stop the corruption of politics by big money. 

He knows that he doesn’t want to be bankrupted by the cost of health care and college tuition for his kids. 

He knows that he wants women to have control of their bodies.  
He knows...he knows....he knows.....

But the whole political establishment pretty much conspires against him.

The power structure engages in a massive collusion to cheat him out of what he knows he wants. 

If the truth were not so firmly embedded in the heads of American voters, the GOP spinmeisters wouldn’t have to turn on their water cannons to flood the airwaves with their lies in a vain attempt to dislodge the truths that most voters hold self-evident and sweep them down an Orwellian memory hole.  

That is why you have a Romney pollster confessing in a flash of candor, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”  

That is why you have GOP operatives working behind the scenes to flip the vote numbers.  
That is why they have to trump up a non-issue like voter fraud to suppress the vote.

And that is why, when all else fails, they resort to the unkindest cut of all. 

They pretend that the voter is unfit to vote, not because he lacks an ID, but because he lacks an IQ.