Putting On Scary Airs

As the 2012 election season races towards its inevitable closure in 22 days, we're seeing a significant increase in the fear-mongering techniques of certain political hopefuls and their supporters.

We're not really surprised at this behavior. We could just chalk it up to the coming celebration of Halloween during an election year and ignore the fake fear - but that wouldn't be the best idea. In fact, looking at just who is trying to scare the American people by ramping up the fear factor tells us a lot more about the state of this year's political races than most of the polls.

In case you missed it heading into the weekend, some of America's corporate plutocrats appear to be awfully afraid of President Obama winning this fall, given that they've taken to throwing massive temper tantrums in the form of threatening their employees to vote for Mitt Romney - or else.

The CEO of Westgate Resorts, who built the largest house in America (90,000 square feet!) along with the CEO of Koch Industries (one of the largest backers of the Republican Party), both sent letters to their employees recently, effectively telling them to vote for Mitt Romney, or they could lose their jobs.

This voter intimidation technique is not only ethically reprehensible, but it may also violate Section 11.(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It's also horrible business, since both letters effectively broadcast to the competitors of Koch Industries and Westgate Resorts that neither company is doing very well - and imply that neither company will be doing well in the future unless they can get unethical and/or illegal favorable treatment from the government.

There's more fear being spread in the churches too.

In Burlington, Iowa, a pastor at City Church recently began preaching about the removal of Iowa Supreme Court Justice David Wiggins, and displaying brochures that specifically call for Wiggins' removal - both of which are a blatant violation of Federal law. He's not the only one violating the 501c(3) law that gives churches tax-exempt status. Nearly 1500 pastors, preachers, bishops, rabbis and imams deliberately broke the law earlier this month, specifically in order to bring politics into their religious places.

We don't have a problem with religious organizations expressing opinions about the issues of the day. But if a church, synagogue, or mosque wants to get into politics, then they need to follow "man's laws" as well as their God's laws. In other words, if they want to advocate for the election or defeat of specific candidates or ballot measures, then it's time to start rendering unto Caesar.

The media's been driving a larger than normal share of fear too, lately. Corporate media execs, desperate to keep high ratings and sales, will most assuredly be flogging their staff members to call every political race a desperate tie - especially after the next Presidential debate this Tuesday.

Even the Romney/Ryan campaign has been spreading fear, as they've continued to politicize the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans even after multiple sources at the State Department have confirmed what Vice President Biden said last week in his debate.

The unifying trait we've noticed from all this fear-mongering is that almost all of it has been coming from the political right in America. Meanwhile, on the political left, the early voting returns keep showing significantly higher voting rates among Democrats and left-leaning independents than it does Republicans.

As we said earlier, we're not surprised at all the fear-mongering this year. We're just bored with it.

You'd think they could at least get better costumes.