The Uninformed Voter: The Biggest Threat to Democracy

It happens every election. Uninformed voters cast their votes at the last minute for the candidate whose last ridiculously-expensive television commercial they saw, cast their votes against candidates based on gut-level emotional attacks – monumental lies, mostly – by their opponents, without ever taking the time to really examine the candidates, what they say they stand for versus what they really stand for, and what it really means for their own economic and social well-being if Candidate X wins the election.

In Washington State, we also have a cumbersome initiative process that over the last few elections has managed to confuse the public and bog down the electoral process. Unfortunately, many of these initiatives, while they are skillfully titled and worded to appear benign, cynically manipulate those who are not really paying attention to vote against their own best interests.

For example, to us progressives, pretty much any initiative proposed by our own Republican political gadfly and pseudo-Populist Tim Eyman is automatically suspect. Every one of his initiatives, despite whatever innocuous-sounding name he slaps on it ("Initiative Measure No. 1132 concerns state expenditures on transportation"), is aimed at crippling government and destroying the public's faith in it. His centerpiece, of course, was 1999's infamous I-695, which, even though it was subsequently declared unconstitutional, had – and is still having – a tremendously devastating effect on this state. His many subsequent attempts were never quite as successful, but that hasn't stopped him from becoming a master media manipulator and successful wingman for the Republican right wing. He's become such a "media darling" to a complaisant press in this state that they always know that he can be counted on to say something so borderline outrageous that, even if it makes for bad public policy, makes for good television.

Progressives, sadly, really don't really have anyone with Eyman's skills and abilities. He might be selling snake oil to the voting public, but he also makes them want to buy it. It may well be that the truth will set you free, but first you need to know the truth.

So what can be done? How about a massive educational drive designed to make voters understand what they can do to avoid these manipulations by a select corps of Grover Norquist "starve the beast" acolytes?

Sidebar: Norquist, you may recall, is a Republican operative whose most famous line was that he wanted to reduce government to a size where he could "drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the tub".

Beyond that, it is up to each and every one of us to educate ourselves on the candidates and the issues for which we are expected to cast a thoughtful ballot in November. It's also up to each and every one of us to talk to our friends, relatives, co-workers, even that stranger on the bus, and educate them on the candidates and issues. This is true over the entire country, not just in Washington State. And don't drop your guard. This year's election is only the warm-up round for next year's Battle Royal.

This is where we progressives have it over the so-called "conservatives". They won't do that because they can't. Most of them cannot successfully articulate their positions because they are among the very worst when it comes to uninformed voting. On the other hand, they have a follow-the-herd mentality which means that they don't have to think about things. We do, and we will.

Damn that Woodrow Wilson Anyway

"Don't know much about history" -- the words of a popular Sam Cooke song from 1998. It ought to be the anthem of Glenn Beck University.

The Beckster has gone off on any number of rants about the Progressive Movement of the turn of the 20th Century, but his main whipping boy seems to be Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, comparing him to -- and crediting him with -- the rise Adolf Hitler, eugenics, the communist threat, and just about every other evil horror of the 20th Century that you can think of.

I will admit that there's a hell of a lot about Wilson that I do not admire: His lying about getting the US into WWI, his continuing segregation of the Federal bureaucracy, his overt racism (he once described the KKK-celebratory film Birth of a Nation as "history written with lightning") but he also was part of a political movement that culminated in the Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Farm Loan Act and America's first-ever federal progressive income tax in the Revenue Act of 1913.

So why does The Beckster vilify Wilson with such statements as "This is an evil SOB, man...One evil SOB -- bad dude!...I mean, he's a dirtbag racist, is he not?...I hate this guy. I don't even want to show his picture. No, don't do it. Don't show it. I hate this guy...He was a horror show, wasn't he? A horror show, possibly the spookiest president we've ever had."?

Well, my guess is that it wasn't because of his snobbish elite-Southern-gentleman racism but rather, since Wilson was in part responsible for all of those commie lefty pinko fellow-traveler socialists laws listed above, all of which were passed by Congress and signed by Wilson in his first term, he makes a handy target on which the know-nothing meathead Teabagger Beck can pin all of the blame for the things that have gone 'wrong" with this country since 1912.

Never mind that the Progressive Movement's biggest champion and most outspoken proponent was a guy named Theodore Roosevelt, who is apparently being let off the hook by The Beckster only because he was a Republican. Never mind the fact that TR, were he alive today, would be shunned by Glenn Beck and his own fellow-travelers in the Teabagger movement and the rest of that wholly-owned-subsidiary-of-the-wealthy-corporations, the Republican Party.

Be sure to read the Washington Post's Dana Milbank story, Glenn Beck is obsessed with Hitler and Woodrow Wilson. (I'm just saying.) for further clarification of Beck's uniquely warped perspective on American -- and world -- history.

Election Results -- B'bye Magic-Bullet Specter

Yesterday's election results were good news for progressives across the board. Especially in Pennsylvania, where a Democrat kept control of the Murtha Seat in Congress, and where Republican turncoat Arlen Specter lost -- and lost big time -- in the senatorial primary.

And that was despite the fact that the big guns in the Democratic party all campaigned for him, including some "robocalls" made by Obama himself.

Why did he lose? People are fed up with Democrats who are "Rethug Lite" -- look at Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas, for example -- and are ready to go with the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.

Besides, I believe that a lot of people, myself included, have never forgiven Specter for the two things that will live in infamy in American history: The appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court is one.

And the other?

The Single Bullet Theory in the Warren Commission investigation into the assassination of JFK.

The Theory, dreamed up and fabricated out of whole cloth by none other than Arlen Specter himself when he was a Warren staff attorney, has never been able to stand the cold hard light of reality, despite desperate attempts by such disparate persons as Gerald Posner and the otherwise-rational Vincent Bugliosi.

It, almost by itself, derailed the actual investigation and assisted in the now-decades-long confusion and coverup of the true facts.

No, I'm not ready for the tinfoil hat just yet, but I've been a student and critic of the Warren Commission and its phony "report" for 45 years, and I can say with absolute certainty that there is simply no way under the laws of physics that Commission Exhibit 399 (aka the "Magic Bullet") could have been responsible for all of the damage it was alleged to have caused to two separate individuals.

At this point I'm willing to concede that we will probably never really know the truth about the Kennedy assassination(s). Thanks, Arlen. G'bye and don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. Good riddance.