Prometheus 6

It’s Voter-Fooling Time in America

The homestretch of the campaign season historically puts treacherous distortions of the truth before the voters, none more so this year than a mysterious California letter informing thousands of Latino-Americans that immigrants have no right to vote. “You are advised,” begins the Spanish-language letter, dripping with authority, that if “you’re an immigrant, voting in a federal election is a crime that can result in incarceration.” It now appears that someone in a Republican Congressional campaign conjured a contemporary spin on a classic scare tactic from torchlight politics.

Comparable outrages surface daily now, with an ad for black voters in six states misrepresenting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s politics in a staged chat between two black women: “Dr. King was a real man,” says one actress. “You know he was a Republican,” the other chimes in.

[P6: This paragraph was composed entirely of anti-troll pixie dust. It was the necessary gesture implying a moral equivalency between the two national party's campaigns. It was not appropriate in this otherwise fine editorial.

These distortions of truth...no, why soft-pedal it, these lies are in a whole different class than the personal attack ads run by either party. They should be treated as such...that all the perpetrators are Republicans is just a convenient heuristic.]