I recently watched a CNN interview with Republican strategist Joe Watkins. The particular issue was the Ohio recount. What I want to know is, how can the Republicans get away with their people just coming on the TV and flat out telling a lie? It’s the same old tired strategy of “if you say a lie often enough, eventually it becomes the truth.”

Watkins claims that a recount is just a case of sore losers and that the taxpayers shouldn’t foot the bill. The Democrats point out that the Democratic National Committee is paying for the recount, and give a list of ways the Ohio vote was potentially fraudulent, unfair or mismanaged.

Watkins kept saying during the interview that the taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for it. They aren’t, the DNC is. He has a line he’s supposed to repeat, a message that he’s not supposed to deviate from. Obviously, that message was “taxpayers are going to be paying for the investigation in Ohio.”

How do the Republicans get away with it? Why are they allowed to? This is just one snapshot of why our democracy is failing, why President Bush was, beyond all reason, re-elected and why the media is 100 percent complicit in all of the fraud that is perpetrated on the American public today.

To add hypocrisy to the lies, Watkins tells how the privatization of Social Security will be painful in the short term, but there will be long-term benefits. For whom? Not for the average taxpayer, but for those who can afford to invest (which is not a large segment of the population, by any stretch). Of course, the hyper-investor class is part of the Republican base. This whole business stinks, and the trillions that it will cost to implement will add to our national debt, all of which was incurred by this current president whose strategist, Joe Watkins, thinks that taxpayers shouldn’t be “footing the bill.”

Jason Call

Everett