Foley Fallout

posted by The Vidiot @ 7:38 AM Permalink

I was listening to NPR's "Morning Edition" while showering this AM and heard a report on a poll of Republican and Independent rural voters on what the Foley thing will do to their vote and the poll showed that the Foley thing means nothing to those people. One was quoted as saying "I don't think what Foley did is what's important. The Iraq war is important and when I go into the booth, I have to put all that aside and vote for where I want this country to go." Another woman said "I'm pro-life and morals and that's what the Republican party stands for, despite someone like Foley."

Now, on the surface, one might think these people are idiots. If you consider yourself a "moral" voter, how can you vote for a party whose leaders apparently have no morals. If you vote on the direction you want this country to go, how can you vote for a party whose every move indicates they don't care what you think and will do what they have to to win.

But dig a little deeper, and the poll actually clearly reveals what we all already suspected: that the majority of people vote the way they vote with very little critical thought. There's no way you can look at what's going on in Congress right now and not extrapolate their behavior to other things, like the leadup to the war with Iraq, the medicare system, social security, etc. If they're so hell-bent on hiding something like someone's sexual peccadilloes, when it comes to something REALLY damaging, just THINK how coordinated their actions would be to cover that REALLY damaging stuff up. Look back at the Monica thing. While what Clinton wasn't all that perverse, what really got him into trouble was all the parsing and spinning. Had he just come out and said it, there may have been no problems. But his parsing and spinning was indicative of his entire presidency. He parsed and spinned everything all of the time. (Well, to be fair, all politicians do. But Clinton was the master.)

But, the lack of critical thinking, whether it's due to the poor schooling, too much TV, bad media, whatever, will keep the majority of the people in this country from really thinking about this government and their role in it. And the same idiots will end up in office over and over and over again.