I sometimes feel ready to lose all faith in humanity. People are actually trying to pay Carson for his anti-Muslim statements:
For Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson, months of robocalls, campaign speeches, and merchandise sales paled in comparison to the campaign donations he received after a series of anti-Muslim remarks. Carson, who drew widespread criticism after declaring on Sunday that the United States should not elect a Muslim president, is now raking in the cash from donors who share his anti-Islam sympathies.
With the number of Muslims in the US population staying somewhere under 2%, chances are most of these people have not even met any Muslims. So they are parting with their own money, money they could spend on having a good time or buying something for their kids, to pay Carson to say something stupid about a subject they are unfamiliar with.
That’s about the same percentage of the population as American Jews (depending on who is included in the count), but the Jewish vote is concentrated in a couple of large states where Jewish voters can swing a close election by determining which party gets those states’ electoral votes.
I’m not defending Carson’s indefensible remarks — he’s as totally unqualified and unelectable as Trump –but Muslim voters in the U.S. are too dispersed to have any impact on national elections, so neither party feels the need to court them.
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Right you are, he’s unelectable. So these people are simply throwing their money away.
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Well, the total cost of the 2016 election has been estimated to reach between 5 and 10 billion dollars, so an incredible amount of money will be washed down the drain over the next 16 months.
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Yet people keep complaining how hard-pressed and nearly indigent they are a lot more than anybody in any third-world country does.
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Nothing works like bigotry. So far in the Canadian election the Conservative party’s performance under the stewardship of Prime Minister Stephan Harper had been going sideways with a three-way split in voter preference between the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP. Then he made a statement in the last English TV election debate about “recent immigrants”, conservative speak for non-white, lazy, importune, probably jihadist liberal supporters, having the same healthcare as “old stock Canadians” i.e. hard working, white Conservative voters. The election polls now seem to be moving towards an indication of a Conservative victory.
http://www.thestar.com/news/federal-election/2015/09/24/conservatives-swing-into-lead-close-in-on-majority-government-new-poll-suggests.html
Sensing a winning formula, Stephan Harper has now doubled down in the last French language leader’s debate.
“In his closing statements, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper even made his support of the niqab ban a fundamental part of his campaign platform. It had earned only a minor mention up until now.
“Never will I say to my daughter that a woman has to cover her face because she’s a woman,” Harper said.”
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/09/24/why-you-should-watch-the-french-language-debate-tonight.html
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In Montréal, people see these degraded, shrouded women all the time. Sometimes, they are dragged around on leashes by their owners. Those same owners make life intolerable for non-shrouded women. Is it that surprising that people are getting fed up?
Unless somebody other than the Tories finds the courage at least to mention the issue, the Tories will keep winning. It is quite strange that Conservatives are the only party that is managing to address something that is so hugely important to women. Everybody else has easily sacrificed women’s rights to the cause of feeling like kindly benefactors to immigrants.
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