As the 2012 elections approach, the Republicans are pulling out time-tested strategies from past campaigns.

Republicans have their corporate alliances and religiously fundamental base that is far to the right of most Americans that they must hide their true agenda behind patriotism and sloganeering in order to win elections. If elections were free and fair, democratic and open to more participation, there would be fewer Republicans in Congress and state legislatures. Thus, instead of promoting their anti-labor, anti-environment, anti-regulatory, anti-troop, anti-senior, anti-education, and pro-billionaire agenda, they must rely on manipulation, emotion and trickery to win in many Congressional districts. Here’s how they do it.

1. Fear Mongering

Fear is a good alternative when the facts aren’t on your side. Republicans have created a vocabulary of fear in order to cow the populous into supporting them. So when they are trying to promote tax cuts for their billionaire friends and cuts to Medicaid, education programs for children such as head start, and cut to Social Security, they make sure to call all health programs for the lower classes “socialized medicine” and put the focus on those lazy teachers while they cut these programs.  When Republicans want to defend the outrageous wars, they bring up the fear of “them terrorists” no matter how safe we are at any moment. If they want to discredit a candidate, Republicans with often ignore their opponents actual stance on the issues or his or her record against them in a truthful way. They call them “liberals” or “far left of American values” or “weak on defense” or they tell their base and the populous that the Democrat (or moderate Republican) wants to “take your gun away” or “supports the killing of babies” or supports “death panels”, none of which is true. They invoke the fear of immigrants by pointing to the Democrats support of immigration, even if it is legal immigration using a process that Reagan supported in the past. They paint opponents with all the labels that enhance fear and hope that something sticks.

The questioning of Obama’s citizenship and the accusations of his Muslim past tap into a fear of the strangers, the foreigner and the prevalent Islamophobia running rampant in this nation and can amp up Republican participation. The fact that these fabrications are even considered valid are a win for the Republicans for they caste doubts on Obama, and that will help the party of true Americans, the Republicans.

2. Nationalistic Language

Republicans are good at using meaningless and politically irrelevant phrases like “motherhood”, “apple pie” and “baseball” when promoting their candidates and smearing the Democrats. Flag waving and “flag pins” are important to Republicans, or at least they use these symbols to get elected. Remember when the President got caught NOT wearing a flag pin.  (link)

What this has to do with policy is irrelevant to some Republicans. “Hey, he blew up a high school and killed twelve kids, but he was wearing a flag pin when he did it.” Maybe if Doctor Tiller, the assassinated doctor who provided legal abortions, was wearing a flag pin, he would have been spared.

Remember all the talk of “support our troops” back in the 2004 elections and beyond. That was when Bush was sending troops off to a fabricated war, not giving them adequate body armor, and cutting mental heath programs for our soldiers. “Support our troops” was and is nothing but an election slogan, and the Republicans do little to protect the troops except put bumper stickers on their cars. (How Bush failed to support our troops) (How McCain voted NOT to support troops)

Voters are easily manipulated by nationalistic symbolism and the Republicans count on it to win elections. It is a more subtle form of McCarthyism that still evokes emotion and gets conservatives to the polls. This nationalistic language also excludes discussions of the issues, and that plays right into the hands of Republicans. If Republicans can avoid discussing war deaths, spending, and collateral damage (new-speak for civilian casualties), corporate tax evasion that they support, their gifts of land, airwaves and other national resources to wealthy corporations, their environmental record, their callousness toward the poor, their cuts to education and other issues that directly impact the people, they have a chance to win elections. If the elections were about issues, Republicans would have a harder time winning. So they make it about patriotism and fear.

3. Voter Cleansing

Cleaning out voting roles of undesirable voters like happen in Florida in 2000 is another Republican technique to ensure election victory. Democrats who want to blame Nader for the lost 2000 elections need to reexamine the facts about how the state officials, Republicans, pushed for a purging of the voter roles to reduce Democratic participation. Keep blaming Nader’s third party bid and ignore the Republican stealing of the elections at your own peril. For a detailed and well-documented account of the Florida election thievery, read Greg Palast’s “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.” The latest case of vote stealing appears to be Wisconsin, where thousands of votes for Governor Walker’s candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court suddenly appeared out of the air and were supposedly “lost”. http://fucorporatemedia.com/news/30048

4. Reduce elections roles—block registration drives

The recent Kansas law pushed through and signed by a Republican governor forces people to bring a birth certificate to register to vote.

“Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signed a bill yesterday that will require people registering to vote to present  birth certificate or passport to prove citizenship when registering to vote for the first time. MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow said last night that Kansas has become the “gold standard in making it almost impossible to register to vote.””
(link)

Community based voter registration drives will come to a halt in Kansas and other states that pass similar restrictions on registration. This is a clear attempt to reduce Democratic participation, and participation in general, in elections in Kansas.

How many people have their birth certificate on hand when they go to register to vote? Why do Republicans, who supposedly hate government intrusion into their lives, want to create intrusive laws that block voting? It’s because the fewer people that vote, the more likely Republicans are to win.

Attempts by Democrats to expand voting through same day registration and registering when you register your car or get a driver’s license have continuously been blocked by Republicans. (link 1) (link 2) Republicans have even pushed bills to stop students from voting in college towns across America. And college students are more like to vote Democratic. (click to learn more) The more Republicans can restrict voting, the better off they will be in the 2012 elections and beyond.

While those measures are a good start, we need to really limit the voting in the states, and here’s how.

1. Require voters to bring a gun to the polls. Much like the requirement to bring ID, a gun is the only way to prove you are American enough to vote. I call it the Voter Shooter law of 2011.

2. All registered women in every state must go through a medical background check before being allowed to vote. Extensive checks into women’s backgrounds will be done for Lady Liberty, the flag, and to protect the nation. Women who have had an abortion or used contraception will be banned from voting.  Abortion providers will have to enter all present and past patients who terminated a pregnancy into a database used to eliminate these women from the voting roles. All pharmacies will do the same with women who buy contraception.

3. Charge neighborhoods with the hiring of employees, the buying of voting machines, and rent in order to have polling places in their neighborhood. That should keep voting down to only those that contribute enough to society to deserve a vote. However, we will not have a poll tax, for that is un-American.

4. Legacy voting—ban all people whose parents weren’t born in the United States, or whose parents never voted, from voting. We know that legacies in universities help keep out the riff-raff, and this will keep voting down to the deserving people.

5. Ban those that waste their votes on third parties from voting. Why should we pay for those losers to vote, and why should we support loser parties when the Democrats and Republicans have made it next to impossible for these parties to have a chance in the first place. Take a hint Greens and Libertarians, and you lesser third parties, and get lost.

6. Proxy voting—allow people to pay others to vote for them and also use their votes for the candidate of their choice. Hey Democrats, it would increase the numbers of voters and create much need temporary jobs. It worked well when we could hire people to go to war for us, so why not hire people to vote for us?

7. Unemployment as a disqualification for voting. Remember the good old days when being in debt was a crime, and the current state when many of those who have committed a crime can’t vote? Put that together and you can ban the unemployed from voting.

8. Ban the homeless from voting. Wait, we already do that because they need an address to vote. Yee haw, Democracy!

Carry forth America, and make voting fair and free for me and mine like the good Republicans work to do every day. It’s the only way to defend America from terrorists, criminals, drug users, and the unclean and ensure freedom.

Learn about your candidates here:

http://www.votesmart.org/

Advocate for clean elections and other democratic actions here:

http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=183

Sign a petition to end corporate personhood:

http://democracyisforpeople.org/

and amend the Constitution to end corporate personhood:

http://movetoamend.org/motion-amend

Peace,
Tex Shelters

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