How God decided the 2012 election

You can find all kinds of explanations for the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, but here’s one you probably haven't considered...

God.

Or to be more exact, some self-proclaimed Christians’ vision of God and God’s “creation” and “creations.”

And so we ask, is the child of a rapist “God’s gift”? Ask a rape victim. Or just ask a woman.

The second part has to do with God’s somehow endowing women with the miraculous, innate ability to end a pregnancy if they don’t want to bear a child that results from “legitimate” rape (whatever that is).

This sounds vaguely like a reverse variation of the virgin birth.

Here we have a bit of pseudoscience created by blind religious belief. But the fantasy doesn’t stop there.

Let’s move on to origin and nature of the planet (think creationism), science and global warming. The Fundamentalist’s pseudo-science argues that global warming is nothing more than a hoax ginned up by greedy scientists to attract grant money.
 
Hurricane Sandy (and other climate changes) put the lie to that notion. The massive storm couldn’t be explained away as the product of scientific greed (although it might be  related to the greed of millionaire oil industry executives).

But wait. You could argue that none of the above made a whit of political difference. Romney went on to win Missouri and Indiana, where Senate candidates self-destructed over the rape/abortion issue. No loss to Romney. The damage was limited to a couple of Senate seats that didn’t go the GOP’s way.

And Hurricane Sandy pummeled states that were going for Obama anyway. Again, nothing changed except perhaps Chris Christie.

Don’t believe it. The rest of us were paying attention. The glaring ignorance of the Religious Right rubbed off on Romney and the Republican Party. Both continued to happily embrace the support of God-fearing and deluded right-wing Christians.

They still do.

And so folks around the country, significantly in states like Colorado, Ohio and Florida, asked: Are these really the kinds of folks we want calling the shots in Washington?

No way.

The Republicans' problem now is that the electorate's judgement will be the same four years hence.

Suspicious unsupported comments on liberal sites

I'm beginning to wonder whether the Republican presidential money machine is paying folks to post non-sense, ad hominem responses to articles on liberal web sites.

Case in point are comments (replete with egregious spelling errors) attached to a current article by George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling on the Common Dreams site.

Do these comments really come from regular readers of Common Dreams? I don't think so. So what brings them to Common Dreams? The Koch brothers?

If the comments made any sense at all, or addressed the issues raised in the article, they would have value. Instead they are vacuous rants devoid of any substance.

Vote in 2012 against The Fool's Game

In his essay “There are Realistic Alternatives,” Gene Sharp, the renowned scholar/thinker on the use of nonviolence, outlines the “elements of strategic planning” necessary for effective nonviolent struggle.

The elements are worth reviewing in the context of the “Occupy” movement. Unless those in the movement are purposely hiding their planning, I’m seeing very little evidence of it.

What we get are shards, fragments and chucks of vital issues, but there is no evidence of systematic strategic planning.

Rather than go into the requirements as Sharp lays them out, I urge you to download the pamphlet from the Albert Einstein Institute web site. The essay and several others by Sharp are available free on-line.

Here is just one example of a fundamental missing element in the “Occupy” movement: “Develop a grand strategy for the overall conflict. Identify the objective of the struggle in clear, specific terms.”

Unless I’m missing something, we are still waiting to learn the “objective of the struggle in clear, specific terms.”

So here’s one attempt to define an objective and describe a strategy to achieve it:

We, fellow citizens, are playing a fool’s game called “Democracy American Style.” It is literally rigged for and by the rich and has produced a plutocracy/kleptocracy.

Here’s just one way it works: our system can’t represent or understand the will of the people because the major means of communication is paid for and controlled by wealthy vested corporate interests. The U.S. Constitution legalizes media domination and distortion by a wealthy elite.

Democracy requires an informed, thoughtful public making rational — not emotional — decisions. Our capitalist, controlled system of communication is not providing that information or that opportunity for full discussion and reflection.

I also believe that the size of our government makes it so diffuse, impenetrable and powerful that it cannot be responsive to the people it governs. We should be a nation of small regional or local governments. At most the “national” government should be an alliance of these small, responsive, local governments. The United States cannot be both “a major power” and a major force for good. The two have been proven to be incompatible.

The over-arching objective of the nonviolent movement should be to put an end to this Fool’s Game and to create a truly representative, fair, responsive and compassionate system of governance based on local representation and involvement.

At the end of his essay, Sharp lists 198 methods of nonviolent action. The sheer number boggles the mind. The diversity is likewise staggering, everything from strikes (he lists 21 varieties) to various kinds of boycotts, to rent refusal, to mock funerals, to marches and pilgrimages, to prayer and worship. The list goes on and on.

But one, number 124, intrigued me in light of the above objective. It reads, “Boycott Elections.”

What if we boycotted the elections of 2012? What if we “voted” by submitting blank ballots. The tally of unmarked ballots submitted would wildly exceed the number of votes cast for candidates. The tally of blank ballots would constitute the vote against “The Fool’s Game.”

What would the consequences be? Exactly what we’d get if we did cast ballots for candidates — more of the same. A continuation of the Fool’s Game.

But by voting against the system, we would have proclaimed that we, the majority, are no longer party to it — that, in fact, the resulting government does not represent the people or their “will.” These “minority unelected” representatives are hence illegitimate.

The only way to restore legitimacy is to establish a new constitution creating a truly representative government (or governments) that can address this society’s needs. A true “government of, for and by the People.”