Opuscula Good for goose Not for gander: Media madness

I CAN’T COMPREHEND WHY suddenly it is unethical, perhaps illegal, to try and persuade voters to vote for this candidate or that amendment.

Trying to convince voters to vote this way or that is what

• advertisements
• political rallies
• polls
• whistle stop stump speeches

are all about.

Millions – perhaps BILLIONS of local currency are spent to win over voters. In some places, political parties still literally buy votes. The old saw “Vote early and often” still applies in some corrupt areas.

So why is Trump being excoriated¹ because someone on his campaign allegedly hired an English company to collect information and filter it to find potential supporters and their “hot button” issues.

No one has accused the Trump campaign (yet) of buying votes; undoubtedly that will be the next unfounded charge.

Does anyone REALLY think a campaign – for anything: person, amendment, whatever – does not try to sway voters?

Get real.

Media gets rich during campaigns selling advertisements for this or that candidate or cause.

Volunteers spend hours calling people to to influence people to support their candidate or cause.

Fund raisers are hired at great expense to fill campaign war chests to fund advertisements, travel, and campaign “experts.”

Campaign managers and their teams are paid to give the candidate or cause a popular “image.”

Pollsters are paid to

• find out how the candidate or cause is perceived
• to find out how to “market” the candidate or cause to the voters
• to determine the voters’ hot button issues; issues that really matter to this or that voter.

I have to ask Hillary’s hangers-on and the media (is that redundant?) why the big deal about the foreign company buying Facebook subscriber information.

Most of the Facebook information is available free – all that’s needed is time to read posters' comments about themselves and others.

Are the Democrats mad because Trump’s campaign apparently utilized the English firm’s findings or, as I suspect, are they upset because they didn’t think of it first.

There is a long history of nasty campaigns in the United States, dating almost to the country’s founding. Two web sites, CNN politics² and Owleation³ report on political exchanges from the past.

Reading some of the attacks suggests that modern politicians have lost a great deal of imagination and command of the language. A sample from the CNN site: "That hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." The “daze” of golden oratory.

With rare exception, the acrimony ceases when the final ballot is counted and a winner declared – or in the Clinton-Trump campaign, when the Mrs. Clinton stopped congratulating herself for a win that escaped her and conceded that Mr. Trump had trumped her. (No hanging chads in this election.)

Did Mr. Nixon reveal Mr.. Kennedy's sexual peccadilloes? He did not. Gentler times? Perhaps.

Were there complaints – long and load – after Kennedy pere bought his sons’ elections. As with JFK’s liaisons with the ladies, the media and the opposing party were silent.

So why, now, do we have the media attempting to pillory the president at every turn?

Granted, he is not a liberal, albeit there are those who claim neither is he a conservative.

He did win the election and, despite the media madness, by legal means.

He has made good on some of his campaign promises; others have been blocked by liberal judges who seem to mimic the three famous monkeys.

The judges objected to his executive order banning immigration – of all residents – of several specific countries known to export terrorism, yet Democrat FDR refused entry of Jews⁴ trying to escape slaughter at the hands of the nazis and their cohorts simply because there might – MIGHT – be a spy in their midst. To be fair, the media also was silent when FDR imprisoned thousands of Americans of Japanese descent with an executive order⁵. (He also sent a handful of German-Americans and Italian-Americans to concentration camps⁶, also sans the benefit of legal proceedings. Again, the media was silent.)

Maybe I’m blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other, but I fail to see that, even if the Trump campaign engaged the English firm, how that is (a) illegal, (b) unethical, or (c) has not been done before sans media madness?

Perhaps Facebook’s owner, a liberal, needs to be charged with selling personal information to the English company. But similar information has been gathered and sold before (and continues to be gathered ans sold – just look at any bank or insurance agreement).

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Sources>

1. This is a word a local talking head was unable to pronounce; she probably doesn’t know the meaning of the word so someone else wrote her script. The word is defined, with audio pronunciation, at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/excoriate

2. http://tinyurl.com/ybleb6pv

3. http://tinyurl.com/yccvufh2

4. http://tinyurl.com/j4lclsz

5. http://www.ushistory.org/us/51e.asp

6. http://tinyurl.com/y8up58ya

PLAGIARISM is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.

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