PUBLIC RELATIONS FOR AMERICA

It appears America’s efforts to counter the ISIS public media messages recruiting young people  is not viewed as being effective.  The director of this particular task has not been named since the last one resigned 7-8 months ago.  The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, says our efforts have fallen way short, and it is probably a valid criticism.

In examining why we are having a rash of young people recruited by ISIS and why our countermeasures are not being effective, I wonder if, in part, it could be blamed on Fox news pundits, talk show hosts and the Republican establishment, including the 14 candidates running for president.  If a car dealership had a significant number of its sales force on the public media trashing their product and telling about why their cars are junk, I doubt seriously their market share would rise.  

We should ask the question, “How can we sell the benefits of being an American to impressionable young men and women while one of our major political parties keeps telling the world that freedom in America is dying or dead?”  Republicans have kept up an 8-year drumbeat trying to persuade the world our president, duly elected by the people, is a dictator who wants to take our guns, impose Sharia Law and God knows what other evil plan.

No team has ever won a championship when the team does its best to undermine its designated leader.  From day one of President Obama’s term the announced goal of the Republican Party was to ensure his failure as leader of the United States of America.  Republicans would revise history by ignoring the fact the economy had already tanked on Bush’s watch by the time Obama had gotten elected. But they continue to blame a slow recovery on Obama.  Currently, one of the loudest allegations from the 14 Republican candidates for president is the mess in Iraq and Syria is the fault of our president and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  

Republicans continue to ignore the fact it was a Republican administration who lied to us, got us into a war costing a trillion dollars and 4 thousand American military lives, and destabilized the entire Mideast.

Americans who love this country, and work for a living or are retired, and who are not suffering from “affluenza,” need to awake to the fact that America is still great.  We don’t need to take our country back as most Republican candidates yammer at every opportunity because we still own it.  We just need to take more interest in its management.  It seems that in Texas at least people who are hurt the worst by Republican policies, including minorities, poor people and union members, are voting the least.  A greater turnout with those in these categories would soon make Texas Blue again.

We need to begin demanding from our elected officials fair treatment of wage earners, including protections to stop business from being able to fire workers without just cause.  We should enact a decent living minimum wage so that people could live on their earnings, clothe and feed their families, educate them and attend to their medical needs.  We should not allow billions to be spent on elections unless voters are told from whence the money came.  No American should die for lack of adequate health care, nor should their families be bankrupted to keep loved ones alive. 

We Americans will do much better selling America to the rest of the world when we recognize the value of what we have, not the least of which is the right to select our own leaders.  In all probability, little is going to change so long as we continue to have less than 10% of our population selecting those who make the major decisions for us all.