[Not a fiery pit post really, but too political for MPSIMS/CS and not debate-y enough for GD.]
I just wanted to urge people to listen to this week’s episode of *This American Life]/i], called “Swing Set.” It’s ostensibly about swing voters, etc., but basically it’s just devastating to the GOP side. Some highlights:
-
a longtime, allegedly informed, GOP supporter who is on the fence, but can’t for the life of him articulate why he likes Bush (since he disagrees with him on every subject) and why he thinks Kerry is “too liberal” (he can’t come up with one single Senate vote, etc., that would explain this position–in fact, he’s never looked at Kerry’s voting record)
-
A truly infuriating rundown of how the GOP is disenfranchising voters, and how their actions are qualitatively different from the worst vote-fraud accusations that the GOP can muster vs. the Dems (namely, that most of the Dem problems are cases were poor people register multiple times–or register fictional people, like Mary Poppins–in order to get more money; things that, in point of fact, probably won’t result in individuals voting more than once; most of the GOP problems are about widespread, deliberate, shameless efforts to keep democratic-likely people, often minorities, from voting at all–and the Dem problems run in the dozens of fraudulent registrations, while the GOP problems run in the tens or hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised voters).
-
a profile of an undecided, uninformed high-schooler who is signed up to enter the Navy, and how he forms his opinions of whom to vote for after listening to his mom (military, due to deploy to Iraq soon, Bush supporter), his brother (military, recently returned from a tour in Iraq, Bush 2000, Kerry 2004), and watching the debates.
Great stuff. And as the host says, you will be yelling at your radio after listening to it.