Ten Reasons I Hate Politics and One Reason I Don’t - Part 2

2.  I’ll Do Anything To Get Elected

I’ll even kiss your baby if that’s what it takes.

“No, thank you. I don’t want to take the chance that those politician parasites get transferred to my child. There’s been too much of the resulting disease going around as it is.”

I will admit, it must be hard being a presidential candidate. You have to travel everywhere, mingle with thousands of people you don’t know and pretend to be their friend or even a long lost family member, and not let anything anyone says to you get under your skin (or at least be able to wait until you get back to your hotel room to exfoliate). You have to remember tons of facts (or at least the ones that favor your position) about the economy, the climate, energy, agriculture, the culture, terrorism, world politics, world leaders, world champions, and world scumbags. And God forbid you should ever forget the name of a federal agency you want to defund. That’ll cost you the election in nothing flat.

But the biggest things that have to be remembered are the lies or misrepresentations you are perpetuating about your opponent. Mark Twain is known for saying, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” I suppose he would also say, “The more you lie, the more you have to remember.” This being so, we know that most politicians have to remember a LOT. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, I believe that before you can become a professional politician, you have to pledge that you will lie at every opportunity. Well, at least at every opportunity that helps your campaign and diminishes the other guy’s.

Much of the misrepresentations the politicians use against one another involves statistics. But as Mark Twain was also known for saying, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” I know where Twain is coming from. I did a lot of statistical analyses of data in my former day job, and I know that there are many ways of presenting statistical results. Look at the data one way and things seem bad. Look at them another way and things seem good. I’ll let you guess which way the politicians use these results when it comes to themselves versus their opponents.

A politician must always be quick to point out how the decisions of their opponent nearly collapsed Western civilization (which some actually believe is a good thing) and how all of his or her own decisions led to full employment, a budget surplus, the cure for cancer, and even the emergence of the Internet. The savvy politician must NEVER admit that anything his opponent did ever led to something good. But if it is obvious to everyone that it did lead to something good, then you MUST find a way to divert the credit back to someone in your own party.

Perhaps you are a person that likes all these shenanigans that politicians like to pull. I don’t. I like to give credit where credit is due and blame where blame is due. Unfortunately, I am finding more and more things to blame coming out of DC and less and less things to credit.