Thursday, September 11, 2014

Open Letter On State Election "Debates"


A rumor exists there will be more “debates.” Maybe by then people won’t be forced to buy carnival tickets to witness what should be accessible and in the public domain.

Take a quick poll of your neighbors; ask if any listened to the gubernatorial and senatorial candidates’ “debates” as staged at the Kansas state fair last Saturday.

We live in a time where every distracted electronic screen grazing person should have access from portable telephones, homes and public libraries to these “debates.”

Yet, every election cycle, as shameless gangsters the manipulators of public opinion put in the "fix." The ringmasters can be seen shoveling stupidity, handing out tee-shirts with pulled pork sandwiches, the better to produce imbeciles.

Rumor of more “debates” do not allow for less gaseous innuendo belching from the mouths of Gov. Sam Brownback and Sen. Pat Roberts, as heard in Hutchison.

Brownback and Roberts blame the black president or Harry Reid at every opportunity, and yell “Big Government” when the numbers don’t work out.

They and a majority in the state legislature are using what Bush #41 called “voodoo economics” to drive the Great Cornpone Revolution.

I predict the next “debates” in Hutchison will require chicken wire fences erected on the stage to stop the rain of rotten eggs, tomatoes and cabbages. The state fair will be more akin to a cheap, greasy Texas honky-tonk franchise by then.

Hollering hecklers that drown out any opposing speaker is cheap theater and confirms the Dear Leaders’ assumption the people are but a mob needing nothing but spectacular sporting events and cheap food. They make asses-out-of-you-and-me.
Hutchison’s "debate" was "moderated" by "experts" experienced in selling oil based farm chemicals and feedlot maintenance as seen in our ditches, creeks, rivers and lakes.

It is a fact the "moderators" from Hutchison can expertly snore out on static-filled AM radio a list of numbers used to speculate on the price of pork bellies. A radio station owned until a few decades ago, by the governor's in-laws.

We should be convening debates in Topeka's garishly gilded legislative chambers, to witness our candidate representatives in contest where taxpayers spent nearly $400 million in renovations. The place is wired for sound, the internet and only seasonally used. The venerable League of Women Voters should be the moderators instead of news barkers selling headlines and advertisements.

Better to hear the braying jackasses and trumpeting elephants in every corner of Kansas free of charge.

Next week I’ll write my impressions of what they had to say in Hutchison, after finding who recorded it.

Mike Caddell
North Jefferson County
Radio Free Kansas

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