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We end up with a puppet no matter who we elect and what either party actually does while in power doesn't have a whole lot to do with what in theory they stand for. Whoever we elect will have scored most of his votes based on tradition and bias. The vast majority of the relatively few people who do switch their vote will have been swayed by a mix of outright lies, half-truths and omissions.
Knowing all of that, yet debating the election as if it actually matters, doesn't make any of us too smart. Throw in that for at least 100 years peope have been listening to the same empty promises about education, health and the other "staples" of election time. Yet every 4 years we buy into them all over again. We accept the myth that we have small government (or at least we still apparently believe we don't have big government, since the threat of it still scares people). We swing between understanding that low taxes do not help the economy grow (usually when it is doing badly), to demanding lower taxes (when everything has been running smoothly for a while).
We knew of George Bush through his father, but how many of us knew anything about him personally before we made him president? How many people had even heard of John Kerry until a few months ago? The only thing most of us know is that every presidential candidate has been bought and paid for, long before the election decides who gets to bring his friends to the trough for the next 4 years.
As I said, I don't think any of us are too smart when you come right down to it...
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