Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Cheating (and deceiving) voters

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A rebellious, if not indifferent, U.S. Senate majority has rejected at least one inane election year "issue": the proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage was voted down.

But other smokescreen "issues" remain to obscure the road to sensible, meaningful discussion by the presidential and vice presidential candidates of the nation’s genuine challenges.

Reducing candidates’ themes to sound bite brevity on "issues" designed to appeal to the gut rather than the intelligence is a gross disservice to voters and a cover up of concerns affecting American life.

The current buzzword of President Bush and Vice President Cheney is "values," a vague word that implies superior morality and ethics, but, in fact, is being used to conceal failures.

It’s a word the Bush-Cheney campaign should be ashamed to even utter, since the "values" expressed in their four years at the country’s helm really betray the values of mainstream Americans.

When stripped of feel-good political obliqueness and cynical shading, Bush-Cheney "values" are a litany of scornful abuses of power, outright deceit and misuse of national resources.

Unfunded grandiose education promises. Rollbacks in protections for the environment. Unshackling polluting industries to poison the water and air. Justifying war with spurious "slam dunk" evidence. Plundering a treasury surplus. Abandoning scientific research to pacify religious dogma. Glamorizing swashbuckling go-it-alone foreign affairs policies. Lavish tax breaks for the wealthy. Crafting energy policy in secret meetings with energy executives. Reckless use of Patriot Act police powers. Millions of unemployed. Hemorrhaging of jobs abroad.

That said, the burden now is on Democratic challengers John Kerry and John Edwards to smoke out the president and vice president and compel them to defend "values" that thus far have lowered the incumbents’ approval ratings to historic and embarrassing lows.

If the Kerry-Edwards campaign allows four years of diminished American values to pass as a new standard in American government, then Democrats will risk forfeiting their claim on leading the nation back to a position of global as well as at-home respect.

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