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Saturday, August 18, 2012

Canada: Muddy American politics

The Toronto Star

U.S. presidential election mudslinging reaches new lows

WASHINGTON—Mitt Romney is a tax-dodging, job-killing corporate vampire whose next manoeuvre, if elected, will be the wholesale shredding of America’s tattered social safety net.

Romney will drive the middle class off a cliff with Medicare strapped to the hood and that poor puppy, Seamus, trembling on the roof.

Barack Obama, meanwhile, is a glory-hoarding, huge-government communist who had nothing to do with the death of arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden, not least because his sympathies lie beyond America’s borders.
Four more years of Obama and the America you love is finished.

Such is the tenor of four-Pinocchio fibs and pants-on-fire lies taking hold south of the border as the U.S. presidential race metastasizes into the home stretch toward Nov. 6.

It’s the first presidential election in which dirty tricks come with no strings attached, thanks to a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that threw open the gates to limitless undisclosed campaign financing.

The tricks have never been dirtier, or so endemic, as they ricochet through the cable news/talk radio/social-media echo chamber, all but drowning out sober debate on actual issues.

Vitriol is hardly new to the gladiator sport of American politics. But the intensity of the poison this time around has some of Washington’s most seasoned scholars at a loss to identify precedents.

Read it at The Star:
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1243388--u-s-presidential-election-mudslinging-reaches-new-lows

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