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Opinion
Smoky Mountain News
A glut of information can paralyze voters T
Senate loses power with impeachment To the Editor: The President of the United States (no longer to be confused, or considered synonymous with, “Leader of the Free World”) confessed on an almost daily basis to having used foreign aid as a lure to coerce the head of a foreign government (an ally under attack by a common foe) to make a public announcement that it’s investigating his political opponent in the upcoming election. He’s even bragged about being untouchable because he’s sitting on the evidence while refusing to cooperate or allow certain officials to testify. Trump was successfully impeached because Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives did their job. But his trial in the Senate stalled when the Majority Leader — who had already demonstrated his contempt for procedure by arbitrarily strongarming the previous President out of a Supreme Court nomination — took a similarly bold approach to trivial details, such as hearing testimony from witnesses. That Senate Republicans would buy into Alan Dershowitz’ cockamamie, inane rhetorical hogwash was extreme even for them. Dershowitz, in defending the President, asserted that since “every public official ... believes that his election is in the public interest,” therefore, “if a president does something that he believes will help him get elected is in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid promo that results in impeachment.” And to think, Harvard
range in 2014, that means in some counties more than twice as many people in this age group went to the polls in 2018. That simple fact tells us that efforts to engage this part of the electorate are having some success. So, what’s stopping others from voting? Here’s what a 25-year-old working professional told our reporter: “I know I should vote but I don’t. I don’t even know who my options are to vote for and haven’t found that info to be easily accessible.” Another 27-year-old blamed a lack of information and misinformation for keeping him from confidently striding Editor into a voting booth. “Being unsure what sources are credible and not just selling a candidate, which leads to the vote feeling somewhat like a shot in the dark and it’s not just positive options. A random vote can help a negative power. The ‘it doesn’t take long’ argument rarely includes the research portion of the casting a vote.” As I edited the stor,y I thought about how our high schools have become so focused on testing that they don’t likely spend enough time on civics and history, I thought about how even at our universities so many have become entirely focused on career preparation that they don’t learn about critical
Scott McLeod
he phones we carry everywhere contain or have access to more information than the largest libraries in the world, many times more. It’s the same with our laptops, tablets, desktops or whatever digital device one prefers. All the collected knowledge of science, literature, mathematics and the arts that humans have amassed since the dawn of civilization is right there at our fingertips. It’s both amazing and overwhelming. Information overload, however, leads to just as many problems as it solves. A story from last week’s Smoky Mountain News illustrates that point. It also — at least by my way of thinking — is a good plug for the reliability of the old-fashioned newspaper, whether consumed in print or online. We wrote about people in their late teens and twenties taking part in elections — which translates to actively participating in the civic life of the community they call home — and found there were some pleasantly surprising, but also baffling, conclusions. As it turns out, 18- to 25-year-old voter participation is on the rise. From the 2014 to 2018 election, voter turnout among this age group was up by double-digit percentages in nearly every county in our coverage area of Haywood, Jackson, Macon and Swain counties. For those four counties, the average turnout among this age group was 30 percent (which was close to the statewide average). That may not sound so good, but considering that turnout was in the 12 to 20 percent
LETTERS University actually pays this looney-toon to teach law. So, what are we left with? We seem to be cursed with an assemblage of elected officials to whom the Constitution of the United States means nothing, to whom taking an oath (in God’s name) means nothing, to whom representative government, checks and balances, democracy, and the rule of law, mean nothing. The United States Senate, by acquitting Donald Trump, has chosen to reject evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the president whose abuse of power the Founders specifically created the Senate to counteract. Americans have no choice but to conclude that self-centered fear of intervention by Trump into their reelection campaigns has made Republican senators not just supporters of this incorrigible, unmanageable and unchangeable president, but eager accomplices in his aggressive and egregious misuse of executive privilege and (perhaps unwittingly) decisively weakening their own power. It’s almost as if these senators thought themselves unworthy (with the exception of Mitt Romney (Republican of Utah) of removing this unfit president from office despite their constitutional and moral responsibility to do so if the evidence warranted it and (despite new evidence having been barred from the trial by Sen. Mitch McConnell and Republican senators) from what we knew already, this president clearly met the criteria justifying impeachment and removal from office. No one described the Senate trial better than Ross K. Baker, distinguished professor of
thinking and have a difficult time analyzing all that information at their fingertips. More importantly, though, it made me realize how the important role that local newspapers play in our civic life has been diminished. I don’t care if you live in New York City or Bryson City, the best — and most trusted — place to get factual stories about candidates running for office is almost always the local newspaper. Whether it’s simple questionnaire or a story about an important issue, nine times out of 10 you’ll find useful, factual information in the local newspaper. That’s just what we do. And even if a reader may disagree with what shows up in the opinion or letters section of a newspaper, that doesn’t change the validity of the news stories. Despite the harping by some politicians who simply don’t like what’s reported, fake news is rarely found in newspapers. The primary election in North Carolina is just a few weeks away. Search our website and you’ll find Republican and Democratic sample ballots for all our counties, and with that in hand you can research the candidates in each specific race. Find an hour to squirrel away somewhere and do your homework by searching reliable news sites. Our community, our state, and our country at least deserve the amount of time it will take to make an informed choice. (Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymounrtainnews.com)
political science at Rutgers University, when he said: “What we are witnessing is a Senate in the act of institutional suicide.” It has been stated and written in one way or another by so many writers ... the Founders tried to lay what they perceived would be a permanent foundation for a new nation striving toward its ideals and future greatness. They clearly anticipated and feared someone like Donald Trump, and tried their level best to give us the remedies and protections we’d need to shield and preserve our people and our nation. Unfortunately, because senators chose to violate their oaths and to disregard the Constitution, the safeguards were unable to protect us from the president’s wrongful acts. Let us hope the Republic the framers envisioned doesn’t fail as well. David L. Snell Franklin
The annual state of the lies To the Editor: During his State of the Union address to Congress, President Donald Trump repeated more than 20 of his more common lies according to fact checking organizations. To be clear, these are not misstatements. They are flat-out lies that have been debunked. In my opinion, the most egregious was his contention that he and the Republicans are protecting the coverage for preexisting conditions. While Trump was making that statement his administration was in court suing to eliminate such protections.
Trump claimed that drug prices went down this year. However, there are reports that pharmaceutical companies had actually raised prices on a range of medications. Payments by third party payers did not show a decrease. Only if someone switched from a name brand medication to a generic would you expect a decrease in prices. Then there is the Trump claim that this is the best economy ever – made more than 250 times before. But by a variety of measures this is false. The rate of growth is the same or maybe now a bit less than under Obama and lower than it was from 1997-1999 under Clinton. Unemployment was lower during Lyndon Johnson’s administration and was also lower in 1953. The gross domestic product rate of increase was more during the 1950s and 1960s than during Trump’s administration. Trump keeps claiming that his tax cuts were the biggest in history. Reagan’s tax cuts were larger. But to slow the deficits those cuts created, Reagan also raised taxes a number of times. In Trump’s case his tax cut has increased the national debt by trillions of dollars without doing much, if anything, for the economy. The vast majority of the cuts benefited the top 5 percent. This week we find out that to pay for those tax cuts Trump proposes to cut Social Security and Medicare. Trump claimed that the net worth of the bottom half of wage earners increased 47 percent. According to economists this is total BS. Nothing supports the claim. Even if there was some indication of a percent increase, it is likely to be largely a statistical illusion. Many low-wage earners have no net worth — they live paycheck to paycheck.
