Don't be fooled

Depending on how things work out over the next couple of months, Americans could find themselves faced with a daunting choice: To vote for someone with a record of pandering and not always being honest but you hope she’s telling the truth this time, or to vote for someone with a record of pandering and a reputation for straight talk and telling the truth but you hope to goodness this time he isn’t.

The recent hullabaloo over gas prices has been enough to set a political junkie’s teeth on edge, not to mention make grown economists weep and newspaper editorial writers run out of words.

Consider this: You might have to choose between John McCain, a Republican, who says he’d like to give America a “gas tax holiday” and Hillary Clinton, a Democrat who wishes to run against him, says that’s a swell idea, and proposes that it can be paid for by sticking it to the oil companies with a “windfall profits” tax — a tricky prospect, considering it would require both houses of Congress acting to pass that legislation between now and when school lets out. Congress. The House and the Senate. One month.

If you don’t see a problem there, then ask yourself: Will George W. Bush ever sign a bill imposing a new tax on anyone, let alone the oil companies?

Barack Obama, who opposes the idea, is catching all kinds of flak from the Clintons, who claim that he is “out of touch” because he thinks saving a family $0.30 a day, or $25-30 for the whole summer, is not worth the 300,000 jobs it would cost, let alone removing $9 billion from the highway funds that are used to fix everything from potholes on I-35 to bridges over rivers and canyons.

Well, Hillary did respond to that last week. She decided to say, instead, that it would “save the American people $8 billion.” Sounds more impressive, that’s for sure. Who among us wouldn’t love to have a share of $8 billion dollars?

But, you know what? Your share of that, given the millions of Americans who pump gas and drive, would be — ta-da! About $0.30 a day.

Not so fast, some would argue: What about truck drivers, taxi drivers, long-distance commuters, and farmers? They need a lot more gasoline and thus are hurt more by skyrocketing prices. True, but the reasonable point has been made by reasonable experts that we should and could help those folks with tax credits, something that would come directly from federal funds without abandoning needed highway repairs. And wouldn’t have to be accomplished in just a month.

Those weeping economists, by the way, are almost unanimous in saying that it’s most likely any tax reduction would just be consumed by the oil companies anyway, keeping prices just where they are. Because they can.

So, under the McCain/Clinton plan, instead of taking from the oil companies to give a break to the consumer, we’d be taking from the consumer to give to the oil companies. Great plan.

I’ll tell you what’s going wrong in America. It is not that we have a “red state, blue state” divide. No, the division in this country, when it comes right down to it, is between those who are content to believe anything they are told, without regard to source, and those who just don’t understand how they can fall for it.

I’m going to join that happy crowd that blames “the media” for a lot of what’s going on in this election season. In this case, I blame the TV media for hyping, ad nauseam, whatever story gets the most viewers even when it offers no enlightenment; the blogging media that perpetuates outrageous rumors without one scintilla of documentation, whether out of carelessness or out of bigotry or just hate for the “other”; and those of the print media that don’t find important issues important enough to spend the space.

The Founders felt so strongly about having a free press that they amended the Constitution to provide protection for it. After all, without a free press (think Thomas Paine), America might never have come into being.

Americans have always understood the role of the free press to be to watch and report on what their government is doing, and that the free press is essential to the survival of our democracy. When that freedom is abused by the media, in whatever form, we are being disserved and we should object.

Service is honesty; disservice is perpetuation of rumor or retelling of unexamined events.

And yet too much of our information is just that.

If the reporting we read and hear includes all the information that is relevant, and not just sound bites and what the reporters think people may think about them, then we will be better able to decide on an issue, or a President.

The great journalist Ambrose Bierce once declared that the vote, our most sacred right, is “The instrument and symbol of a free man's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country."

Let us not be fools.