". . . the argument seems to be that the state can impair a constitutional right because…well, because they can. It doesn’t really matter why, it just makes a kind of instinctual sense, like how vaccines cause autism or how evolution can’t exist because I’ve never seen a thing evolve in front of my eyes despite staring at it and chanting “evolve” for hours on end." wrote Jesse Taylor yesterday.
Meanwhile, back in Florida, where excluding "undesirables" from the voter rolls is a tradition of long standing, former Florida Republican Party Chair Jim Greer is suing the “whack-a-do, right-wing crazies” that filed criminal fraud charges against him in 2010 in a plot to force saner Republicans including former Governor Charlie Crist out of the party and suppress the African-American vote by once again purging voter rolls.
Florida of course, bans ex felons from voting for life for those without good connections in the GOP, like Governor Scott of the Fourteen Felonies, so if one wrote a bad check in 1956 or was found with an ounce or so of Cannabis in 1968, one can go fish forever. In fact if your name sounds like someone else who did, and you live in Florida, you may have been illegally banned from voting in the 2000 election by a similar voter roll purge that targeted minority voters and probably put George Bush in the White House. You may be banned once again and you won't likely know until you show up at the polls.
It's funny how consistently the voter fraud circus parade neglects to mention the voting machine "problems" in Ohio. Again, I'm a cynic so I find it easy to believe that GOP tampering is treated differently in the Post Bush, Tea Party era. Remember those "unhackable" Diebold machines that took only minutes to hack, delivering more Republican votes than could be accounted for by registered voters -- and delivering Ohio for Bush, as the CEO openly boasted before being forced to resign over accounting fraud? I wonder if he's still on the voter rolls.
Naivete here: How do they consistently get away with it? Is the arrogance just so severe that they just don't care?
ReplyDeleteCapt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteExcellent post -- enjoyed the Pandagon missive as well. The voter (i.e. black and brown people who have an annoying tendency not to believe the required right-wing pablum so many clueless white people accept without demur) is no doubt part of the GOP's dead-ender strategy to stave off their demographic doom. Sure, at some point the country will go minorities-as-majority and then the everything-just-short-of-pointy-white-sheet notions of the Republican Party won't sell at any price, but until then, they can just keep stealing elections by disenfranchising POTENTIALLY MILLIONS of the above-mentioned not Republican enoughs. It'll work until it doesn't work, they probably reckon. The joke may be on them -- Mitt may be such an unsellable sham-candidate that not even all those billionaires' money and all those transparent lies and distortions and all those suppressed votes are enough to put him over. We'll see in about 100 days, one way or t'other.
Laura asks a good question by the way -- I don't know, but I think the righties really stopped becoming even slightly ashamed of what they do about a generation ago: when they catch you lying through your teeth, just tell another and even more absurd lie. I've long said that a main strategy of unbearably stupid people is just to keep being unbearably stupid and repeating stupid things until the smart, educated people become exasperated and realize how much of their lives is being wasted on trying to educate stupid people that THEY JUST GIVE UP AND GIVE IN. Why mess with strategy like that? It's gold! Yep, trickle-down worked, all government whatsoever is "socialism" (unless it helps rich people, or you in particular), and the best foreign policy is to start wars at the drop of a hat, preferably against poorly, unjustly chosen targets.
It's arrogance and I can hardly blame them for their lack of shame, because nobody notices. Everybody is kept occupied with the outrageous, fabricated story of the day and they're having too much fun being part of the mob.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, the more ridiculous the lie, the more it consists only of accusing the other guy of what you always do: the more often and the louder it's repeated, the better the strategy works. Of course it's tempting to give up and give in because the vast majority are ignorant and stupid and proud of it.
And, as usual, the saurian solon is right about minorities and that's why I usually feel more comfortable around the not-so-white. I admit it's a prejudice, but it's a fact that they are more likely to see through the crap.