JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum America's Watershed Election.

Pat,

I am glad you looked that up though it blew what I thought would be an interesting social experiment (and I wish there was a list that actually took the email point by point which I haven't found myself). I was curious to see if someone would jump on it based solely on the salacious factors taken as is.

I prefaced it with exactly what it is. It has taken some actual truths and twisted them a great deal. We've gotten to the point in this election process where people aren't satisfied in chosing specific issues to support someone on, nor are they content with pointing out the failings of other candidates. Now they've gone from smearing people with the true bad things about them to something much more damaging and ugly.

We could easily go in and find equally evil stuff said about all of the remaining candidates and I thought about doing that, but figured it would tip my hat to easily (which you've done for me anyway Pat). In this particular case with Obama, I found it even more egregious than the typical attacks on Hillary and McCain (like the unsubstantiated reports in the NY Times accusing him of an affair or the myriad of hatchet jobs attempted on Hillary) because it came from so many types of people.. liberal democrats and conservative republicans. Religious people of a different faith and people who aren't religious at all. Men and women. And even different races. Instead of pointing out true things about a candidate to support a particular candidate, or at least true stuff to avoid another over, folks have ratched it up a notch. And why is that?

If you have to make false stuff up about someone having bad points they don't have what is it you REALLY dislike about them? Are there actual reasons which you can't be honest about (like race or sex or religion)? Is it simple ignorance? Is is that there's simply nothing good to say about any of them or there's nothing bad to say that's honest? Makes you think doesn't it? It sure makes me think.

I think it's an important phenomena.. it's like people would rather defeat someone over the wrong reasons than to learn if there actually ARE reasons they should or shouldn't support them. Don't you find that fascinating?

So.. this didn't go on very long, I was hoping to get some discussion on it and see what people said. If someone had said "I could never vote for someone who had X in their background" wouldn't it have been interesting to say, hey, guess what, "X" isn't actually true.. so will you support them now?

But I am glad that you took the time to look into it and post a link to some facts about it Pat. You rose above the tempations even though it didn't lead to a long discussion.

Brian