I invite you to answer the following 14 questions about Barack Obama and John McCain. Vote on whichever questions you are confident you currently have a deep enough understanding of each candidate to have developed an informed opinion. For what I hope are obvious reasons related to integrity, I have NOT voted on any of these items.
If there are items you don’t yet feel informed enough to vote on — and this is very likely — here are the most valuable things you can do to become informed in as spin-free a way as possible:
- Go to the section of each candidate’s website in which they describe in detail their positions on the issues. Read what they say (or don’t say) about the topic you’re investigating. Don’t listen to what the spin doctors say the candidate’s position is. Barack Obama’s positions. John McCain’s positions. Important Note: Ignore what each candidate says that the other candidate’s position is, because the vast majority of the time what they say about this is spin-doctoring!
- Go to You Decide 2008 to view uncut, unedited videos of all of the presidential debates. I commend the integrity of You Decide 2008 for providing this service, for endeavoring to be as non-partisan as possible, and for being transparent about its conservative bent. To be a Spin-Buster, a crucial part of part of what you must do is to get your information straight from the horse’s mouth. Watching and listening to the candidates themeselves, and how they interact with one another is far better than reading anyone’s analysis of these events.
- Go to YouTube and do a search that includes the candidate’s name and the topic. Watch only those videos showing the candidate speaking about that topic. Make sure the video clip is long enough that you are hearing the candidate’s position in context rather than out of context. Clips that show a candidate saying something out-of-context are acts of spin-doctoring and should be ignored. Also ignore videos of others saying what the candidate says about that issue.
- Go to the Political Fact Check website whenever you need to separate fact from spin in comments that a candidate, his spokespeople, other politicians, or the pundits, make. (This website is so outstanding at separating spin from fact that I gave it one of my Integrity Inspiration Awards.)
- Go to www.ElectionTaxes.com to compute what your taxes would be if Senator Obama becomes president and gets his way, and if Senator McCain becomes president and gets his way, compared to what your taxes would be under at current tax levels.
- Register for a free audio webcast/teleclass on October 14, when non-partisan integrity analyst and integrity educator Dr. David Gruder answers your most burning questions about upgrading your Voter Savvy.
Unless you take the time to understand both candidates equally well — directly from their own mouths rather than from the mouths of others — and through successfully separating fact from spin regarding both of them — you are abdicating your responsibilities as a voter and therefore as a citizen.
The resources I have provided above give YOU the power to be a Spin-Buster. They empower you to upgrade your Citizen Savvy. The more people who use these resources, the more the pundits and other spin doctors will be robbed of their propaganda power. The more this occurs, the more our country’s political integrity will be upgraded! Please use these resources to help you live up to your responsibilities as a properly informed voter.
Your responses to all of the poll questions below remain entirely anonymous. As a matter of integrity (after all, this website is about integrity development!), I ask you to only vote once for each poll item listed below.
When you’re done, more valuable information awaits you after the last poll question.
Click here to learn more about Debtism
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But, whether or not you attend that event, it is absolutely imperative to understand that the reason we have such massive integrity problems today is because we have equally massive delusions about what creates life fulfillment, what defines business/career/financial success, and what effective leadership entails.
These delusions are causing an epidemic of personal exhaustion and illness, lack of authenticity, unreliability in relationships, greed, corruption, spin, debting, ideological extremism, special interest manipulation of government, inability to create synergistic solutions (these are far more effective than what compromise produces), dysfunctional leadership… essentially all of the problems we face today as individuals, as families, in our communities, in our society, in business and in government!
Said another way, our delusions about fulfillment, success, and leadership create severe deficits in ALL of the following vitally and equally important aspects of integrity:
- Self-integrity
- Relationship integrity
- Employee integrity
- Business integrity
- Religious integrity
- Health care integrity
- Educational integrity
- Financial integrity
- Citizen integrity
- Government integrity
- Journalistic integrity
- Leadership integrity
- Societal integrity
Said yet another way, until we outgrow our widely accepted — but dramatically dysfunctional — assumptions about fulfillment, success, solution creation, and leadership, we will remain unable to create truely helpful solutions to the most dangerous crises we face as a society: the crises in…
- Integrity of all kinds (see the list above)
- Societal money management (that is, Debtism and Greed)
- Retirement planning
- Health care
- Energy
- National security
- Employment
- The legal-judicial system
- The tax system
- Government wasteful spending, inefficiency, and manipulation by special interest groups of all kinds at the expense of serving the common good of the citizens it exists to serve
- Abdication of citizen responsibility, including societal susceptibility to being manipulated by spin and the false hopelessness and apathy this creates, which in turn enables government leaders and employees to get away with abdicating their constitutional responsibilities to serve the citizens
- Education, including educating children and adults in the fundamentals of democracy, of what being a republic means, and of citizen responsibility entails
- Fanaticism Disorder
To outgrow this insanity, all of us are called upon to :
- Embrace the principles of Integrity-Centered Life Fulfillment… because these principles serve us as individuals, because they serve our relationships at home, at work and in our communities, and because they serve society-at-large.
- Develop the seven core life skills necessary for attaining Integrity-Centered Life Fulfillment… because all of us can do this once we know what these skills are and how to develop them, and because these seven core life skills are equally necessary for personal wellbeing and authenticity, healthy and effective relationships, and serving the common good as citizens and as leaders.
I wrote my two-award-winning book, "The New IQ: How Integrity Intelligence Serves You, Your Relationships and Our World" to fill this desperate need. It provides a road tested blueprint that all of us — from everyday citizens to world leaders — can use to build Integrity-Centered Life Fulfillment in ourselves, instill it in our children, and help restore true integrity in our society.
Regardless of whether you utilize my book and its accompanying workbook to accomplish this, I urge you to commit today to start doing SOMETHING that can empower you to do your part to help end this insanity!
If not you, who? If not now, when?
