Why Won't They Let Me Say What I Wanna Say (in a Meaningful Manner)?

Poor Mike Gravel. Poor Ron Paul and poor Alan Keyes. Poor Kucinich and poor Edwards.

I was looking through the Sunday paper in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution and I noticed in the politics section (Page F3) that they did this lovely little chart that puts, succinctly, in black and white, the candidates and their views. And it's all very nice, it helped me better understand some of the stances on the issues, because I unfortunately missed some of the debates.

Except, Mike Gravel and Ron Paul, both of whom are still very much in the race were not represented on that page. Neither was Alan Keyes. In fact, on the entirety of the page, Paul, Gravel and Keyes were not mentioned.

It is a shame when people who are running for the most prestigious office in the country are not given fair time and not given fair representation for that race because they do not have the same amount of money as everyone else!!

Here it is Super Tuesday, and here in Georgia everybody that I ask (with very few exceptions) knows all about Mitt Romney and his many wives (a joke people I know that he doesn't practice polygamy). They know all about Mike Huckabee and Senator Clinton and Barrack Obama (well, they think they do.... They believe he's a Muslim). But almost no one that I talk to knows who Mike Gravel is. They've heard of Ron Paul, but do not really know his stance. And until today, I did know who Alan Keyes is.

Today is the vote for the party in twenty-four states. Today is the caucus and the primary for almost half of the nation. And the media still has not given fair representation to these men. Does anybody remember taking history in school? Anybody remember the main reason why America revolted against the British regime? Because of unfair and unequal representation!

Why have Mike Gravel, Ron Paul and Alan Keyes not been given the same time as the other "major" candidates? The answer, I fear, is the same as it always has been. This is not a race for the best candidate. This is a race for the rich candidate who happens to be best.

The media's disinclusion of these distinguished and outstanding men is an outrage to the very principles that this nation was founded upon. Our school-children are taught that this is a free nation, that people can be whatever they wish to be in this nation. But this apparently is not true if the media will not include somebody in a debate or in an article in the paper solely on the grounds that he or she does not have the same amount of funds that the other candidates do. Are we going to continue to allow school-children to grow up in a fairy-tale of "do whatever you want" only to have to face the cold, hard truth of "money is king"?

(In the beginning, I mentioned both Dennis Kucinich who, until he dropped out of the race, suffered the same problems as Mike Gravel, as well as John Edwards who, among other reasons, suffered the same fate. I felt that these two men, although they are out of the race, still deserve mentioning in a blog of this nature.)

UPDATE: I was informed by a commentor (thank you BradFinAtl) that Ron Paul actually raised more funds than any other candidate on the Republican side.(Source) This shocks me, because he is not allowed to show his opinion near as often as Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani (before he dropped out), Mitt Romney, or John McCain are.

In some ways, this dispproves me saying that the media will only allow someone to participate in debates and will only give "equal-time" if they have enough money. However I agree very much with the commentor. I believe that not only do you need the money to be able to support a campaign, you need to be liked by the mainstream media. Even though Ron Paul raised the money, he did not make the cut in saying what the media wanted him to. He is too far away from the center of the political map to be liked enough by the mainstream media, even if several citizens like him.

Please leave comments of your own opinion. If you wish for me to talk about something in a future post, please be sure to email me at billvoltage@alltel.net. Please include the words "Tolerance and Peace" in the subject line, so that it is not kicked back by my SPAM filter. Thank you.

Media, Conservatives and Terrorists ! Oh My!

I'll start this post with the note that my grandmother is a die-hard conservative. She knows that I am liberal, but not that I am an atheist. She knows how I feel about a good number of issues because we frequently discuss them. She and I recently went out to lunch together. We got into a discussion about the presidential election, as is bound to happen these days. The Primary is Tuesday here in Georgia, so she is really coming down to whom she wishes to go and vote for. I, unfortunately, will be too young to vote in both the primary and the real race this year. Next year, I will be old enough to vote in local elections, and I will definitely be old enough to vote in the next presidential election. She is backing Mike Huckabee because she agrees with him because he is a "moral and honest man" and because "he's a Baptist preacher". I really do not like him because he wishes to shred the Constitution for his own ideals.

But she said something about Mitt Romney that amused me quite a bit. We were talking, and she was giving her short synopsis of all of the different candidates. She said, "And Romney, well he's strong on the military issue. We need a president who will be strong on the military issue like he is. I mean, we have all these terrorists running around."

And that struck me as a little odd. How is it that the conservatives have so swallowed the media that poor old grandmothers can be convinced that there are terrorists lurking in the shadows of everywhere that they go? Or, as my grandmother would say, how have the terrorists so swallowed the media that their deeds run rampant on every channel you turn to?

It is just a little odd, I think, that the conservatives are running out of methods to make people support their war. They have had to resort to two methods that I've seen. The first is the "Well, if you don't support the war, you're not patriotic" method. This method is a mud-slinging and uninformed method. (How is killing people patriotic?)

The second method that I have seen them use is to grapple with the media and to resort to scaring people about the war. If people are convinced that terrorists are everywhere, they are more likely to support the War Against Terror. Well I'm not convinced of either.

I believe that terrorists have existed since pretty much the beginning of the human race. We just called them priests to begin with. As long as someone is willing to die to further his or her cause, there will be terrorists. ("Imagine.... nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too.") Since terrorism has always existed and likely will always exist, it seems foolish to declare a war against it, doesn't it? I personally think that the War on Terror will be just as successful as the War on Drugs and Abstinence-Only Sex-Education.

A country cannot declare war against a material object. The object firstly has no will to fight back, but secondly has no means to fight back. You can declare war against the users of drugs, but I agree with Mike Gravel in his saying that drug-addicts are not criminals, they are people with problems. They should be treated as people with problems, not as criminals.

If you declare a war against terror and then the media uses terror to rally support against the terrorism, do we still call it hypocrisy? Not in America, we call it the “American Dream”. (And like George Carlin said, they call it the American Dream only because you have to be asleep to believe it.)

Please leave comments of your own opinion. If you wish for me to talk about something in a future post, please be sure to email me at billvoltage@alltel.net. Please include the words "Tolerance and Peace" in the subject line, so that it is not kicked back by my SPAM filter. Thank you.