Booing Ron Paul evidence that voters don’t want honest conversation

By David McElroy · September 15, 2011

U.S. military forces have spent a decade fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but most Americans still don’t have a clear idea why those wars happened. What’s worse, it’s considered unacceptable in some circles to tell the truth about why terrorists from the Middle East attacked the United States 10 years ago. People honestly prefer to remain in the dark about it.

When the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 happened, it was understandable that many people were emotional and frightened. I can even understand — if not condone — the fact that many Americans were willing to support irrational foreign and military policies under such stress. But I have no sympathy for people who refuse to face the truth after this long.

Republican presidential contender Ron Paul is the only presidential candidate who’s been trying to have an honest, adult conversation about why the terrorist attacks happened and why the two wars happened. Shamefully, voters are showing clearly that they don’t want to hear him. In the CNN Tea Party debate Monday, Paul was booed when he outlined why certain groups are upset with the United States. It’s not that they have facts to indicate that he’s wrong. They merely don’t like the truth that he has the temerity to speak.

In the first campaign I ever ran — when I still knew nothing of the correct tactics for winning an election — we talked about nothing but issues. We issued white papers. We ran ads outlining detailed proposals that could be easily implemented to make huge improvements for the city. (A friend was running for mayor of Birmingham.) We ran a serious and credible campaign with honest proposals to solve problems. My guy got something less than 5 percent of the vote.

Two years later, we ran the same candidate in the city, but this time we took the opposite approach. I’d learned a thing or two about how the game worked. We didn’t say a word about policy. We didn’t make any proposals. We didn’t say anything serious. The entire message of the campaign could be summed up with, “I’m a nice guy. Vote for me.” He won pretty easily.

American voters don’t want serious and honest discussion of complicated problems. They want false saviors to “tickle itching ears” with things that don’t make sense, but which appeal to the desires of the voters to get something for nothing. The last thing they want is the truth.

I’ve written before about why Ron Paul isn’t going to be elected president. Even if it weren’t for the factors that I wrote about then, though, there’s another issue. Paul tells the truth about controversial and complicated issues. He treats his listeners as though they’re adults, not as though they’re children. He tells them ugly truths rather than pandering to the voters’ base desire to be lied to.

And here’s the bottom line about why no serious candidate is going to win. Voters don’t want to hear the truth. They want candidates to tell them what they want to hear. The last thing they want is an honest discussion of complicated issues. The Ron Pauls of the world — few though they may be — don’t have an honest chance with the majority, now or ever.

If you believe that voters are going to suddenly wake up and start acting like adults, you’re betting against all of the evidence. So if you believe in freedom, why do you keep expecting a majoritarian system to produce anything other than what it’s always produced?

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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