Pinocchio Aspires to Be the Next US President

The words “politician” and “liar” often seem to go hand in hand in North America, where continuous lying in politics has been the norm.

Trying to deceive citizens to gain their votes is a political tool that has been used for hundreds of years during election time in this country. As well as demagogy, lying has been present in every election that has taken place in the United States over the past two centuries. Making promises that cannot be kept comes almost naturally to any North American politician.

They say that a presidential candidate from Ecuador promised during a speech to build a bridge, and that when they screamed to him that there was no river in that town, he then promised to build them a river as well. I do not know whether the story is true or not, but there is no reason to doubt it. Almost every single politician promises what he or she sees fit in order to win an election. The thing is that they fib cautiously and hide their lies within truths so that they are not found out so easily.

In the United States, is it very easy to say one thing in one state and the opposite in another due to the voting system that they have in place. Here [in the United States], as we all know, the votes in the presidential election are not counted by totaling the votes cast throughout the nation; instead they are totaled by state, with whoever has the majority vote in any given state declared the winner.

There have been incidents in which the elected president lost more votes than he won. In the 2000 election, George W. Bush beat Al Gore; however, putting any cheating aside, Gore won over half a million more votes nationally than Bush.

Thus what candidates care about is winning the votes of individual states, which is why they say whatever the voting public wants to hear. We must understand that one region’s problems are not necessarily the same as another’s. Florida may have an unemployment rate of 10 percent, while Delaware’s is 7.5 percent. So the speeches of each candidate consequently vary from state to state.

In the United States, with the two-party system, there are states in which a candidate does not even build an electoral campaign, since he already knows that the overwhelming majority in that state will vote against him. For instance, a Republican candidate will not waste even a minute of his time campaigning in New York, as he knows that the vast majority of voters will vote for the Democratic candidate.

So the tales of the presidential candidates can vary according to the place of their utterance. The lies are spouted in whatever way is convenient for the candidate and are hidden as best they can be.

The real problem arises when a candidate not only lies to gain votes, but also continues to lie and then denies all knowledge of the matter when confronted about it — all without even blushing. It is the same story for Republican candidate Mitt Romney. This gentleman lives a constant lie, contradicting himself every time he opens his mouth.

In the debate held a few days ago with President Barack Obama, Romney defended all the issues that he had tackled during his yearlong campaign to become his party’s leader. When he was campaigning for the Republican primaries, Romney did and said anything he could to gain the support of the tea party, the famous far right conservatives. These reactionaries did not look kindly upon the candidature of the ex-governor of Massachusetts, considering him not conservative enough. Nonetheless, he eventually earned the backing of the tea party, who supported his nomination by the Republican Party, all thanks to his conservative discourse.

Now, after discrediting and offending half the citizens of this country, calling them government dependents, Mitt Romney has realized that he did not stand any chance of winning the election following his right-wing speech. He then adopted a strategy of absolute denial, changing his rhetoric completely in the first presidential debate and catching Obama off guard with his lies and tales. Any resemblance to the Venezuelan politician Capriles [the defeated opponent of Hugo Chávez in the recent Venezuelan elections], who suddenly became almost socialist, is not just a coincidence. It is a reality of the discourse of rightists who repeatedly lie, despite their steadily growing Pinocchio-like noses.

In spite of everything, I still think that President Obama will be re-elected for a second term in November, because, as I have written previously, he may not be the best, but he is definitely the best of the bunch.