Stealing the Election, One Lie at a Time

The 2012 election cycle turned into a real surprise to Americans with the following assets: common sense, a sense of honor, a reasonable grasp of world events and American history, along with some notion of how the American and global marketplace works.  

I mean common sense dictates that the presidential candidate with a proven record of success, experience, with no skeletons in his closet and a seemingly really nice guy, father, and grandfather would be a shoe-in over a candidate with a proven record of mediocrity, failure to keep his promises, top down governance (if you can call it governing), no practical experience, a worrisome lack of leadership and propensity to blame others for everything and anything that he should be responsible for.

If you're being honest with yourself  you have to wonder where 'the great uniter', 'the agent of real change', 'the one we've been waiting for', went after Mr. Obama was elected president in 2008.

He has been anything but a uniter.  He does not seek common ground with political opponents.  His record clearly shows him blaming and even preaching to Republicans when he's not ignoring them.  But that's no big deal, right?

So how did he convince 51% of the voters to reelect him?  Lies.  That's it.  Nothing but lies, redirection and delaying tactics.  The president's campaign against Governor Romney contained no factual information, but did include many big lies and deceitful adverting. 

For instance, Obama campaign ran an advert where a man, Joe Soptic, accused Romney of killing his wife.  The ad claimed Romney/Bain Capital bought the steel company the Mr. Soptic worked for and the man lost his insurance followed by his wife dying of cancer.  The problem is it was absolute fantasy linked with half truths.  Not a thing about the lady's passing was correct or factual other than the cancer.  The real story is the the wife had her own insurance that she had even after hubby lost his job.  Even left leaning Politifact rates it as completely false.

"She had no insurance because a shoulder injury caused her to leave a job that provided coverage. That was the immediate reason for her being uninsured, not the plant closure." - Politifact

Then there is the Benghazi murders a few weeks before the election.  The Obama campaign spun up a story to make it past the election.  His concern was that some news outlets would report his failure in protecting the ambassador and 3 others by claiming that the attack was spontaneous and a result of a bad video made in California.  He sent Susan Rice out to repeat the propaganda on five different Sunday news shows.  Of course that is total nonsense.  The attackers were Al Quaida linked terrorists who cared out a successful and planned attack against Americans in Libya.  And that is a problem because 'on top of the situation' claimed that Al Quaida was on the retreat.

The biggest lie, heralded as the "Lie of the Year" by Politifact, President Obama said that 

"If you like your health care plan, you can keep it," - President Barack Obama (Politifact)

An opinion poll was conducted on November 18-20, 2013 and found that 23% of Obama supporters would not have voted for him if they knew they'd be losing their insurance.

This all points to a need to clean up political speech.  While it is perfectly OK for politicians and their supporters to attack opponents' records and inflate their own, they should be disqualified for making up false narratives and passing them off as factual.  

The average American voter does not have the time or the inclination to fact-check political advertisements.  When they (we) see/hear political ads and assume the information is based on fact. 

When the falsehoods are so egregious as the Obama/Joe Soptic political ad, it's time for the Federal Election Commission to step up and do two things; 

1. Force the campaign to to correct the lie.
2. Disallow those producers, creators, writers and proponents of the lie filled campaign ad from participating in further campaign ads for the remainder of the the election cycle.

It is equally important that the major news outlets report the facts instead of supporting one political party or one politician over another.  The US Constitution gives the media special treatment to help keep the government from exceeding its authority, but that is not happening.