The times they are a changin'

(Not 100% sure that this blog doesn't violate my "No political punditry before the elections" vow, but hey if I lied it fits the theme of the blog.)

I am about to share a well kept and very dark secret with you all. It may shock you so small children and those with weak constitutions (Hey that's a pun!) should leave the room. Go ahead, I'll wait. (Hums the Banana Boat song) Okay everyone clear that needs to be? Good, cause here comes the bombshell.

Politicians Lie!

Yep there it is, out in the open for everyone to finally see. Probably going to have hit squads coming after me for revealing that secret, but it was worth it to get the truth out. Hope you folks can live with the truth.

Now, most of you who read my blogs (all three of you) are prolly expecting me to start some long, cranky rant against peoples named Bachmann or Perry or (God help us) Gnewt and usually with that sort of lead in you'd be right, but not today. Today, I am talking about all the Politicks and a great difficulty that these poor souls are facing in the modern era.

Not that long ago, these men and women could lie to their hearts content. They could and often did change their stories and promises from one town to another telling each group exactly what they wanted to hear and then changing things around for the next one. They could lie about their military service, public service and even their funeral service with impunity and generally get away with it. Most people had no way of checking and, especially in smaller towns, people only read the local paper. The Ticks could spin webs of pure fancy and no one would know.

Now enter the modern, electronic, instant access world where three year old kids can surf the web and find stuff. Where everyone carries a cell phone that doubles as a video camera. Where anyone with any interest can type a candidate's name in a search engine and find out if he really did lead the charge in the decisive battle of "insert impressive sounding battle here." A world where even the smallest town in Small Town America is wired into the world around them.

Suddenly the Obamas, Perrys and Romneys of the world are faced with a scary world that they really don't seem to understand. The old saw of saying one thing then saying another three days later just doesn't seem to work any more. They can't (Well okay they can and do) deny they said something in Moosehill, Az that made them look like liars or idiots because someone in the crowd has already posted the video they took on Youtube.

If they wrote a politically embarrassing book, they can't take back the words they said in it even though the vast majority of America has not read it because the News Programs prattle on about it 24/7 every time the Politick speaks. If a place they stayed at has an racially insulting name, they can't avoid it because someone has snapped a photo of it and posted it on FB. (Honest I am not picking on Perry this time, I promise!)

Politicks are doing their best to become more and more savvy about the modern information age, but let's face it most of them (Like me) were born well before all of this techno stuff really caught on so they still use the age old tactics of their forebears and expect it to work. Sure, some of them hire "experts" to help them deal with the Tweeters and...Twitters...Woofers? out there, but most of them are just about as old as the candidates so mistakes keep happening.

(As a side note here, let me say during all of my research for this, I really only found one of the current crop of politicals that is actually efficiently using the modern mediums and seems to be keeping his stories straight and consistent. The funny thing is he's like the oldest of the crop, Ron Paul. Something funny about that.)

So unless the Politicks catch on and start getting things straight, I don't think we are going to stop seeing someone preaching about what a good man they are while we are reading about how they served divorce papers on their wife while she was in the hospital with cancer. We are probably going to have to wait till the younger generations get older and start running to see any sort of effective use. Course by then, people will probably be using their virtual reality electro-esp head bands to check out all the lies being told. Which beggars the question, can Politicians ever catch up?