Song of the South

" If it hurts a bunch of lazy Blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.” 

Said North Carolina state GOP executive committee member and precinct chairman Don Yelton, about the new, more restrictive voting laws  --  and there you have it, the cornerstone, the key assumption, the basis of Republican philosophy.  I can't say, as much as it might seem otherwise, that there's been no progress in the old, old, quest for recognition of people of color as fully human; as real citizens with the same rights and privileges and responsibilities as white, Anglo-Saxon Americans.  After all when I was a kid, he wouldn't have said "lazy Blacks."

Barack Obama is of course all about buckets of chicken, watermelons, welfare checks and leering at white women, or at least he is in the imaginations of people like Yelton who is after all, the sad remainder of what was once a political party.  All else, all that purports to be principle, philosophy, policy and patriotism is simply camouflage. It's not a coincidence that what others might think of as undeserving categories of white people aren't mentioned, the kind of folks that a previous generation subjected to forced sterilization so that they wouldn't pass on their inferior genes. Undereducated, malnourished, uncivilized, unmotivated, intoxicated made dependent by welfare and ill-suited for informed citizenship, they're nevertheless white and at the very least more nearly all right.  In fact so many of them vote Republican they're needed, if for no other reason.

People that may have been Dixiecrats back before the civil rights movement alienated them from the Democratic Party,  have been feeling sorry for themselves since before the Civil War, burdened by the requirements of modern civilization which they see in terms of their hard earned money and privilege being taken away by the damn Yankees and given to the "takers."

And now one of "them" has taken the presidency. Ain't gonna let that happen again!

I often think of Republicans like Winnie the Pooh without the charm: as creatures of very  little brain, but of course they have their wicked wizards, smart enough to fire people like Yelton who make too much noise from behind the curtain and expose the game.

The County GOP Chairman, in firing Yelton's ass this week said in a statement to a local TV station that Yelton's statements were:

“offensive, uniformed and unacceptable of any member within the Republican Party.
“Let me make it very clear: Mr. Yelton’s comments do not reflect the belief or feelings of Buncombe Republicans, nor do they mirror any core principle that our party is founded upon, This mentality will not be supported or propagated within our party.”

Except of course in practice.

Bush v. Gore Redux (With 2 Updates)

In Election Year 2000, Al Gore won the national vote by a plurality of over 2 million votes cast. The Bush campaign won the not so great State of Flori-duh by a mere 531 votes - winning an Electoral College victory but making George Bush only the second president in history without a popular mandate. No other democracy in the free world counts votes quite like the United Reprobates of Amerika. Eleven years later, former Supreme Justice John Paul Stevens writes in his new memoir, Five Chiefs, that the Bush appeal to the United States Supreme Court was "frivolous" and should never have been granted (source):

He recalls bumping into Justice Stephen Breyer at a Christmas party and the two having a brief conversation about the Bush application to halt the recount by issuing a stay. "We agreed that the application was frivolous," he writes. "To secure a stay, a litigant must show that one is necessary to prevent a legally cognizable irreparable injury. Bush's attorneys had failed to make any such showing."

Imagine what the world would be like if the SCOTUS stayed away from politics … and let the election be decided in Flori-Duh after massive amounts of election rigging had come to light.**  If the vote count were reversed in the Florida Supreme Court, imagine a world with no George Bush! No Darth Cheney! No fungible Rumsfeld! No Bush tax cuts!  No decade of ruinous wars! And no economic meltdown!

**  Database Technologies (DBT) won a $4 million contract from the state of Florida to assist the Division of Elections in the removal of ineligible registrants from the voter file.  Ultimately 173,127 Floridians were identified as potentially ineligible to vote in the November 2000 election. Of those on the list, 57,746 were identified as convicted felons, which later proved to be false. The practice of felon disenfranchisement has resulted in the greater likelihood of minorities, especially African Americans – the ones most likely to vote Democrat - appearing erroneously on the Florida felon exclusion list.  For more commentary on election rigging, please read the comment thread below.

TUESDAY UPDATE:  If you believe Bush v. Gore was a freak historical anomaly, think again.  Republicans are determined to create a political monopoly and end democracy as we know it.  Slowly, methodically, bit by bit, they have been laying a foundation nationwide to disenfranchise voters, as this New York Times Editorial explains:

The Myth of Voter Fraud

It has been a record year for new legislation designed to make it harder for Democrats to vote — 19 laws and two executive actions in 14 states dominated by Republicans, according to a new study by the Brennan Center for Justice. As a result, more than five million eligible voters will have a harder time participating in the 2012 election.

Of course the Republicans passing these laws never acknowledge their real purpose, which is to turn away from the polls people who are more likely to vote Democratic, particularly the young, the poor, the elderly and minorities. They insist that laws requiring government identification cards to vote are only to protect the sanctity of the ballot from unscrupulous voters …

None of these explanations are true. There is almost no voting fraud in America. And none of the lawmakers who claim there is have ever been able to document any but the most isolated cases. The only reason Republicans are passing these laws is to give themselves a political edge by suppressing Democratic votes [my bold].

If you thought the stolen election of 2000 were bad enough – the one that gave us 8 disastrous years of Bush/Cheney – get ready for the Republican Reich.

WEDNESDAY UPDATE:  Is the hidden motive behind voter suppression driven solely by the ambitions of one party - to crush the opposition and dominate the national agenda? Or is there more? A political party is merely the public face of its backers in the pursuit of economic self-interest.  In this article, The Real Agenda Behind Voter Suppression, Donald Cohen offers this perspective:

In 1974 and 1975, the Conference Board, a mainstream business organization, held a set of strategic brainstorming meetings with groups of top business executives to understand these threats to free enterprise and begin to chart a course to fight back. They openly expressed their worries whether democracy, in the long run, was even compatible with capitalism. “One man, one vote has undermined the power of business in all capitalist countries since WWII. “ said one participant. Said another, “We need to question the system itself: one man, one vote” [my bold].

… which leads me to an academic question: If you can only have one, democracy or free enterprise but not both, which would you prefer? In my view, the Conference Board debate is a false dichotomy. Democracy and free enterprise are not mutually exclusive because eventually you will end up with neither. In a predatory world of business where the rules are written only by the most powerful, eventually the big fish will swallow the little fish, and all you will have left are lords and serfs.