TRUTH IN ADVERTISING VS TRUTH IN POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS

It's that time again. Political campaing season is coming, now that the polls are history and the voting is starting.

Businesses have to abide to Truth in Advertising, why don't politicians?

Are they held to a lower standard?

We should have all of the politicians wear a collar that would shock them when they lie to the public.

They should also be held accountable for advertising that is used to sway public opinion on their behalf.

Where have all the honest politicians gone, well they've been dead for a long time.


Here are some of the voices of the past about Politics.

“You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.”
― Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary

“In politics as in philosophy, my tenets are few and simple. The leading one of which, and indeed that which embraces most others, is to be honest and just ourselves and to exact it from others, meddling as little as possible in their affairs where our own are not involved. If this maxim was generally adopted, wars would cease and our swords would soon be converted into reap hooks and our harvests be more peaceful, abundant, and happy.”
― George Washington

“The Seven Social Sins are:
1. Wealth without work.
2. Pleasure without conscience.
3. Knowledge without character.
4. Commerce without morality.
5. Science without humanity.
6. Worship without sacrifice.
7. Politics without principle."
From a sermon given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey, London, on March 20, 1925.

“Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
Mark Twain

About political correctness
“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.”
― Napoléon Bonaparte

“Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.

“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
― John F. Kennedy

“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
― Edward R. Murrow

“We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.”
― Frank Herbert

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Extremes to the right and to the left of any political dispute are always wrong.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.”
― Henry Kissinger

“In this country we have no place for hyphenated Americans.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Leadership is being the first to put others second. Wait, that’s not right. That’s politics."
"I trust politicians to do what’s right. For themselves.
”
― Jarod Kintz

“The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli

“The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.”
― Will Rogers

DON'T BE BLUE

Have we learned nothing about the damned Human Race?

excerpts from a Mark Twain essay - 1905

Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which the other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning.
In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scottish Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping.

Then I stayed away two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh–not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.


Man is the Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion–several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven.
He was at it in the time of the Caesars, he was at it in Mahomet’s time, he was at it in the time of the Inquisition, he was at it in France for a couple of centuries, he was at it in England in Mary’s day, he has been at it ever since he first saw the light.................. he is at it today, in Crete, occasioned by the battles between Christians and Muslims.

He will be at it somewhere else tomorrow. The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out, in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste.


Who is the Higher Life Form?
The difference between an man and an animal is that the man is cruel and the animal isn’t; and that the man wantonly destroys what he has no use for, but the animal doesn’t. This seemed to suggest that the animal was not descended from the man. It also seemed to suggest that the man was descended from the animal and had lost a great deal in the translation.
There is this difference between man and the higher animals: he is avaricious and miserly, they are not.
Among the animals man is the only one that harbors insults and injuries, broods over them, waits till a chance offers, then takes revenge. The passion of revenge is unknown to the higher animals.


Roosters keep harems, but it is by consent of their concubines; therefore no harm is done. Men keep harems, but it is by brute force, privileged by atrocious laws which the other sex were allowed no hand in making. In this matter man occupies a far lower place than the rooster.


Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity–these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing; they are not ashamed.  Man is the only animal that blushes.

Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it. It is a trait that is not known to the higher animals.
The higher animals engage in individual fights, but never in organized masses, except to obtain food. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and with calm pulse to exterminate his kind. Animals are territorial and will gather in mass to expell an intruder, but the animals will abandon the task once the intruder has left. Man will continue beyound his territory to hunt them down for no good reason.


Man is the only animal that robs his helpless fellow of his country–takes possession of it and drives him out of it or destroys him.
Man is the only Slave. And he is the only animal who enslaves. He has always been a slave in one form or another, and has always held other slaves in bondage under him in one way or another, for wages, service, nobility or ancestry.


Man is the only animal with the "Moral Sense". The ability to distinguish good from evil; and with it, necessarily, the ability to do evil; for there can be no evil act without the presence of consciousness of it in the doer of it. And man will try to explain it away as an animal instinct or an insaine act like an animal who doesn't know right from wrong.


So....It obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that the theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.


The Damned Human Race – Mark Twain Essay, published in 1905
http://www.zengardner.com/the-damned-human-race-mark-twain-essay/
DON'T BE BLUE

to the United States Congress

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil ------- is for good men to do nothing."

- Edmund Burke, among others.

Contempt of Congress - Then and Now

Pogo had it right!

1958 - Contempt of Congress

The Cold War

Earth Day Cartoon - 1971

Probably the most famous Pogo quotation is "We have met the enemy and he is us." Perhaps more than any other words written by Kelly, it perfectly sums up his attitude towards the foibles of mankind and the nature of the human condition.

The quote was a parody of a message sent in 1813 from U.S. Navy Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry to Army General William Henry Harrison after his victory in the Battle of Lake Erie, stating, "We have met the enemy, and they are ours." It first appeared in a lengthier form in "A Word to the Fore", the foreword of the book The Pogo Papers, first published in 1953. Since the strips reprinted in Papers included the first appearances of Mole and Simple J. Malarkey, beginning Kelly's attacks on McCarthyism, Kelly used the foreword to defend his actions:

“Traces of nobility, gentleness and courage persist in all people, do what we will to stamp out the trend. So, too, do those characteristics which are ugly. It is just unfortunate that in the clumsy hands of a cartoonist all traits become ridiculous, leading to a certain amount of self-conscious expostulation and the desire to join battle. There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us. Forward! ”

—Walt Kelly, June 1953

The finalized version of the quotation appeared in a 1970 anti-pollution poster for Earth Day and was repeated a year later in the daily strip. 

Have an AWESOME day

DON'T BE BLUE