I’ve seen this voter before.
It was 1988 as the nation considered Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Bush for president.
I don’t know how the conversation started, as it wasn’t the kind of topic I’d launch with a casual acquaintance.
Nonetheless, the lady I barely knew, with no prompt from me, shared her choice for president:
“The American one.”
Not the one with the Greek name, about whom she appeared not to know anything else.
She might have had educated reasons to vote for Bush, then vice president. She might have had reasons to oppose Dukakis despite glowing reviews of his multiple terms as governor of Massachusetts – the longest-serving governor in U.S. history.
No. She was fixated on the foreign-ness of his name.
I’ll lay money on which name got her vote in 2024, assuming she’s still with us.
She chose the name with a sturdy single syllable, the American one — not the one whose first name she couldn’t pronounce.
She is, without doubt, the poster figure behind a pivotal slice of voters that will put a convicted felon and ever-on-the-take con man back in the White House.
Before deconstructing that support, consider the news stream by which a lot of voters inform themselves.
Right now, some Republican senators are in hyper-sweat over the horrific and horrifying lineup being placed before them for Cabinet positions.
This includes Tulsi Gabbard, the Big Liar’s choice for national intelligence director.
Gabbard is dubbed “hook, line and sinker, a Russian puppet” by Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who monitored atrocities in his country by another Russian puppet, Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s leader before he and his wife fled the country. Moustafa writes of being aghast to see Gabbard pooh-pooh compelling reports of Assad’s mass atrocities.
Gabbard also has gone out of her way to justify the bloodlust of Valdimir Putin and his rape of Ukraine.
We can be sure these and all security-compromising matters about Gabbard will never invade the innocent eyes of those who trust Fox Spews.
Consider Fox coverage, or lack of it, of what bothers senators about the drafting of Pete Hegseth direct from the Murdoch Cable Circus, where he was a morning show host, to serve as our next defense secretary.
There’s a lot – a swirl of sexual harassment assertions echoed by his own mother. There’s a sexual assault allegation. Then there’s his public drunkenness and his white supremacist shadings in print.
What is the “fair and balanced” channel reporting about all this?
CNN media reporter Brian Stelter writes that Hegseth’s former colleagues on the air “aren’t raising alarms about the allegations or defending him from charges. They just aren’t talking about the issue at all.”
This is a serious problem in a country where increasing sections of the country are “news deserts” – no newspapers, only cable sources or social media.
This increases the likelihood that the nation’s fate rests in the hands – considering that most elections are won at the margin – of a group of low- to no-info voters, or at least those who only know what a propaganda channel like Fox Spews, Spewsmax or the One America Spews Network delivers in its respective quest to deify scoundrels and pander to angry white conservatives.
Many of these people, consequently, have no idea of the staggering federal and state cases that five – count ‘em – five grand juries found indictable for the now-president-elect.
Tragically for the country, none of the proceedings laying out America’s (or Georgia’s or New York’s) case against him have been televised.
An information white-out, the damage compounded by a snow job on cable TV.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
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