Paradoxes of Faith

I want my TV back. I want the chain link fences outside my house back. I want car bumper stickers back. I want the moral fiber of my country back. I want my Church Body to wake up and realize that Jesus cared a hell of a lot more about how we treat the poor and how much our finances control our lives, instead of who’s having sex in what position or what they do on the weekends. Once again, being pro-life and pro-family are incredibly different than being anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage.

But most of all, I want our phones back. I actually hate talking on the phone. I shouldn’t care. but I do, because this article from the New York Times today, New Telemarketing Ploy Steers Voters on Republican Path literally had me sick to my stomach about six seconds into reading it.

This is neither fair, balanced, tactful,or even politically acceptable in political campaigns with integrity. But leave it to the Republicans to twist morality, integrity, and a lust for power into a three-chorded strand of deception. I guess than can steep to a new low. I didn’t think that was possible this year.

But I guess the Republicans have been here before with their deceptive push polls. See below: and if you haven’t voted yet, just remember the hypocrisy in this party of ‘moral & family values’. In a word: Bullshit.

Perhaps the most famous alleged use of push polls is in the 2000 United States Republican Party primaries, when it was alleged that George W. Bush’s campaign used push polling to torpedo the campaign of Senator John McCain. Voters in South Carolina reportedly were asked “Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?”, an allegation that had no substance, but planted the idea of undisclosed allegations in the minds of thousands of primary voters[1]. McCain and his wife had in fact adopted a Bangladeshi girl.

Another angle on push polling is the practice of providing less than the full complement of possible answers in the available response choices, or by structuring the poll question in such a way that the response is limited in a some way thus biasing the poll by excluding legitimate responses and exaggerating the real level of support for the choices given. In the political context, this is most often done by such actions as limiting the respondent to choosing between the “two major parties”, thus artificially steering the public into thinking only of the two parties that are listed and ignoring the existence of the possibility of electing a minor party. This has been so effective in western democracies that they do indeed tend to have only two major parties, whereas in a well functioning healthy democracy there would statistically be expected to be many more with a fairly even distribution of support, although this phenomenon could also be explained by Duverger’s law instead.

Get this quagmire of a party out of office as soon as possible. They’re ruining our country, an accurate view of moral and family values, and are more interested in consolidating their own powers than sacrificing their lives for the benefit of others……Jesus had something to say about these folks, I think….something about ‘whitewashed tombs’ or a ‘brood of vipers’…..I can’t remember exactly.