I just received this email this morning sporting the title, “Instant Poll,” and the brief detail says, “Obama Just announced . . .”
Opening the email I found that it is a deception from a conservative source that slyly, in very large, bold print, says to vote to stop “Stop Citizen’s United.”
A lot of folks will go straight from the large print and vote on the large voting buttons. But the title is a deception. The question on the poll, in smaller non-bold print, however, has nothing to do with Citizen’s United. Just over the Vote Button is the question: “Do you support or oppose Obama’s proposal to make voting mandatory for American Citizens.”
Obama never made any such proposal.
This is why I became a progressive and why I left the Republican Party years ago. While some (most?) liberal politicians will lie now and then, they do not engage in massive email deceptions (propaganda) and they do not have a robust propaganda network such as Fox “News,” et al, which is continuing to spread this lie. This is the sort of dishonorable action that the misinformed, low information, often fundamentalist voter supports.
Evidence posted at this site:
The Benevolent Thou 
Mar 20, 2015 @ 14:29:46
I wonder if they recognize the irony: Keeping people from voting would certainly keep them from being united. Probably. I guess that’s how they see themselves as “Honest.”
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Mar 20, 2015 @ 15:23:56
Georgia, you may very well be right.
I do have a hard time figuring out how so many of them can judge others while claiming to be such big Christians, yet they MUST know when they are willfully deceiving people. Perhaps they believe so deeply that they are right that they believe deceit is the best Machiavellian means to a good end.
In my novel, I gave a quick but true history of the rise of the latest crop of neoconservatives. I explain their worldview, then show how they came to power. I think most congressional conservative have now adopted that worldview.
This is the part that explains how they arrived at their nefarious views.
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It began in the late 1960s with the emergence of a small group of graduate students from the University of Chicago, schooled in a Machiavellian political philosophy of having their desired ends justify their means of obtaining them, and that a Nietzschean will-to-power should be their primary motivating force.
These were the neocons. It was they who breathed life back into the ancient concept of the Big Lie as a useful, political tool, and they were quickly joined by disaffected southern conservative Democrats who lamented their party’s push for civil rights.
In addition to adopting a politic of subterfuge and power lust, the neocons embraced Ayn Rand’s Objectivism—a philosophy advocating that one’s actions were rational only when one’s self interest benefited over the interest of others. It was a glorification of selfishness, and the neocons took it to heart.
Their political philosophy, coupled with Rand’s Objectivism, paved the road to wealth and power for those resolute enough to take it. It was an open road to oligarchy—rule by the few and the wealthy—and the neocons proved themselves worthy of the task.
Their concept of the Big Lie, however, was not the Noble Lie—the religious myth Plato suggested purely as a means of achieving and maintaining social justice within society. Their concept was altogether the reverse. Its purpose was not for the benefit of society, as they professed, but for the benefit of themselves.
It was what Jeff thought of as the Ignoble Lie—a falsehood, or falsehoods, propagated as a means of manipulating politics and people in order to gain political power, personal fortune, and ultimately to replace the republic with an oligarchy. For Jeff, all who adopted the neoconservative worldview were by definition, oligarchs.
They reminded him of classical Athens. The similarities between the Athenian oligarchs and today’s neocons were striking. Then, too, the oligarchs fought continual political battles for the right of the privileged and the wealthy few to rule the city-state. Their enemies were the liberal democrats, who insisted that all men should have the same rights. It was Athens’ culture war, and oft-times quite bloody.
It reminded Jeff of Plato. Disillusioned with Athenian politics, Plato opined that neither oligarchy nor democracy were suitable political systems to bring about social harmony.
As Plato saw it, oligarchy brought about the social injustice of a ruling, wealthy elite whose primary concern was their own appetites. But democracy brought about social injustice as well, because ordinary people had no understanding of how to manage the complexities of government, and as a consequence of their intellectual deficiency, they were easily deceived by the emotional rhetoric of self-serving politicians.
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The major difference between the oligarchs of Plato’s time and ours, of course, is that now they have a robust propaganda network to distort and misrepresent reality to the public. It certainly worked in Germany in the 30s, and its working now in America.
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