Candidate Con Man

[DemocratsForProgress]

Candidate Con Man by Brainwreck

Years ago when I returned home after being away for a number of years, I discovered to my horror that my gentle, tolerant mother, a woman who taught us to accept all people regardless of race, sexual orientation or social standing, had become hooked on a well known radio and television evangelist preacher to the point that she had evolved into a class-one bigot who repetitively used the term “those people.”

Right away she let me know that women like me, who preferred to work for a living and raise their children alone rather than remain with abusive spouses, were the cause of all the evil in the world. She was so convinced that was true that she was in total denial of her own divorce. And possibly as penance for her sins, she sent what little money she had as a donation to further the causes of that television preacher, a man who was already living in multimillion dollar luxury. I could not believe that this woman I loved and most admired had been taken in, and how angrily she rejected everything that she had once espoused. But that evangelist was a skilled con man, who managed to convince a lot of people that his reality was the only acceptable one, and by imposing it on his listeners had managed to swindle millions out of millions before he was done.

The extent to which some people can be manipulated was more recently illustrated by the ravings of an angry biker my daughter and I ran into a week ago. We had headed out to register new voters at a farmers’ market, and instead of finding a block full of produce and unregistered liberals, we found an empty lot and a gathering of bikers. In spite of the fact we were not wearing or carrying anything to indicate we were partisan, my asking if any of them needed to register to vote brought on a bitter verbal assault. The leader of the biker pack ranted in our faces that Obama was a lying S.O.B. and would never get his vote, that the President was sending jobs overseas and doing nothing for vets or anyone else, all false information obviously quoted from Republican sources. And he rudely suggested that we needn’t bother the other bikers in his group because they all felt the same. They were for Romney all the way.

Romney? First of all, as for the bikers being concerned about vets, they should know that Romney was and is a chicken hawk, always pushing for war but never serving. First he received deferments for college and then a questionable deferment as a Mormon missionary serving in France for two and a half years, which wasn’t much of a hardship since he resided in a classy apartment there. As a matter of fact, thanks to his father’s millions and power, and then his own, neither Mitt nor his sons ever served in the military...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2012/08/07/candidate-con-man/