Dishonest Campaigning

The complaints about the Clinton campaign planting questions in their audience is a legitimate complaint. The agents in this case try to generate the illusion that the questions come from the people themselves. The Clinton campaign has been caught 'engineering false beliefs' - in effect, lying for political purposes. From this we can conclude that the campaign is staffed by people who have no particular love of truth or honesty. We can expect them to carry these values into the White House.

If the American public has come upon a newly found hostility to dishonesty, let them at least show it by condemning all who have been dishonest.

Remember when a tape circulated that showed the Bush Administration planting questions among American servicemen in promoting the war in Iraq?

The Bush Administration has perfected the art of managed public appearances - showing up only before audiences guaranteed to be favorable to the President, confining protesters to 'free speech zones' out of sight of the actual event, removing people who wear T-shirts or drive cars with bumper stickers critical of the administration.

And yet we hear little in the way of protest here.

There are two ways to resolve this inconsistency. One is to cut both equivalent amounts of slack. The other is to give both camps equal amount of condemnation.

There must be a footnote somewhere in the Bible that I have never heard of that says that if a person mentions God or Jesus favorably a certain number of times per day, that the moral prohibition against bearing false witness, lying, and other moral crimes simply do not apply. At the same time these people claim that their religion gives them a moral compass that others do not have, they demonstrate how false it is by being unable to perform an honest act, or to condemn others in their click who are blatantly dishonest.

Morality is only required of others - of outsiders.

Of course, nobody is more dangeorus than those who think that morality only applies to others.