This election year, the biggest issue should be the economy — the recession, unemployment, gas prices, shrinking incomes, higher prices, the deficit, trade imbalances, and impending total financial collapse.

But it isn’t.

Barack Obama, David Axelrod, and the regime have shifted the focus of the debate. Now, the most pressing issue facing America is The Pill.

The Pill?

The birth control pill has been on the market for more than 50 years, and it has been accepted the whole time. The Catholic Church has expressed its disapproval based on religious grounds, but even the majority of Catholics don’t agree with that.

So why is The Pill the number one issue in the 2012 campaign?

It is because Obama does not want the focus to be on the failing economy, and on his miserable failure to do anything about it. He does not want the focus to be on his transformation of America from a capitalist society to a socialist paradise. He needs the people to be distracted, focused on something else.

That tactic has been done by tyrants in many countries in the past. Millions of people have been killed after being demonized by a tyrant who wanted to distract attention from his real goals.

In America, some tyrants are more equal than other tyrants. Conservative Republican tyrants are bad. Liberal Democrat tyrants are good.

The media has decided that Liberal Democrat tyrants are good (that is because their intentions are good, so if millions of people have to die to achieve those goals, that is good). And so, the media joined with the tyrants to take the attention off the economy and put it on something else. And since Conservative Republicans have some morals (at least more than Liberal Democrats have), they chose sensitive social issues.

They couldn’t choose abortion, since there still is a significant divide on that question. So they chose The Pill.

No Republican candidate has ever mentioned The Pill. No Conservative Republican is against The Pill (not even Catholics, who possibly, maybe, maybe not, disapprove, only in theory). No Conservative Republican is in favor of taking The Pill away from anyone.

It was George Stephanopolous who asked the question at a Republican debate, and who pressed the issue, and it was his friends in the media blew it up into a big issue. The Republican candidates didn’t stand a chance in defending themselves. No matter how much they talked, the fact that they talked about it at all was their undoing. No matter how much they disavowed the issue, it was reported by the media that Republicans want to take away The Pill from all women.

Then the Democrats put on a sham hearing with a ringer, Sandra Fluke, a 30-year-old activist who moaned that her life was ruined because she couldn’t afford The Pill and her other expenses, and so the government should provide The Pill for free.

Remember, the only purpose Fluke served was to be a poor, weepy witness to support Obama’s plan to force the Catholic church to provide contraception and abortion services, against their First Amendment rights. It never was about Fluke not being able to afford The Pill, or about anyone wanting to take away The Pill from any woman.

The Democrats got a lot more than the sympathetic publicity they expected. They got a big boost when Rush Limbaugh opened his mouth on the subject.

The issue should have been Fluke’s ridiculous plea to have the taxpayers pay for her birth control. No one wants to take The Pill away from her. But it is absurd that she should be subsidized for this.

Limbaugh said this amounted to paying her for sex, and he called her a slut, and he likened her to a prostitute. He went too far in his words. But it was gold to the liberal media.

The only thing reported was that big bad Limbaugh called this poor little girl a slut, and that he and other Republicans are waging a war on women, trying to take away their birth control pills.

It is nothing of the kind. But that is what sells.

The people who are outraged don’t usually listen to Rush Limbaugh — they get their information from a liberal media that filters their information and interprets it for them. They did not hear what Limbaugh said, they heard what the liberal media said he said.

Limbaugh was trying to make the point that the taxpayers should not be forced to pay for someone’s sex life. His crude manner took the focus off his point and put it on himself. That also was gold for the Democrats

Providing The Pill — for free — is now a part of “health care.” Abortion also is now a necessary part of health care, something that was unthinkable not that many years ago.

As outraged as many people were with Rush Limbaugh, the point he tried and failed to make was, where do the government freebies end? How far will the welfare state go, in providing everything to everybody by a benevolent Big Brother government? How much can we fit under the guise of “health care?”

The next four years of an Obama administration will tell us. It also will tell us how much all this “free” stuff will cost us. But by then, there won’t be any money left to pay for any of it.

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Jim Ridings is a frequent contributor and is the author of several books, including “Len Small: Governors and Gangsters,” available at Amazon.com

contraception last sparked the national interest in 1975 with Loretta Lynn’s release of the “The Pill”