Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Learning from Creeps and Bimbos

A very long time ago, I had decided not to buy or read any book written by any creep or bimbo. That decision served me well; however, over this weekend, I watched a talk show where someone was promoting his book, telling all his dirty tricks in rigging an election.

That someone is Allen Raymond, an election rigger who was contracted by the Republican Party time and time again. He told a couple of his tricks. True, he has served time for one of those tricks, because he got caught when he jammed the phone lines of the opposing party, but this one, the trick he got caught in, was one of his nicer (!) ones. The others—among the ones he told and many more are in the book (he says)--included making calls to the people whose numbers he got out of the phone book and whose names looked foreign or ended in –ski, the kind of people –he thought—would be prejudiced against African Americans or any other race or denomination or the kind of people who would most likely be scared of them. Another trick included hiring a bunch of people who acted as survey takers or pollsters and asked questions in a slanted manner to make people reconsider their preferences, or while asking these questions, inserted a non-truth in them about the opposition.

These few tricks have taught me a thing or two already, like to never answer the pollsters and survey takers and to put the receiver down on political ads on the phone. Moreover, since our state has early voting, I went and voted early. Still, I wonder if they can rig the early voting system. Then, I wonder if reading or buying this man’s book could encourage people to do more dirty business so they can write about it, get published, and make money.

Come to think of it, he did talk about what he did as if this ugly behavior were some kind of a glorified child’s play; although, he insisted that he was cleaning, dismantling, and reassembling his own image. Maybe so, maybe he is doing just that, but I fear he has also lost his “honor among thieves” as well as messing with the law and societal ethics.

Then, just because this man worked for one party does not clear the other parties either. Obviously, this sort of thing is common behavior and we are being fed contaminated information, just like the cattle for slaughter who were fed tainted food and thus contracted mad cow disease. The whole thing makes me sick.

Maybe I’ll read the book if the local library gets it. Maybe not!