Things really do work differently in Florida. Now that Congressional District 16 is without a Republican heir apparent, the scramble to substitute Martin County attorney Joe Negron for Mark Foley is fascinating to watch. The party that has bitched about entitlement for so many decades feels such a sense of entitlement that Negron has the cojones to assert that “This is a Republican seat. It’s been a Republican seat for 25 years.”
Such is the sense of entitlement that country commissioners used their meeting last night to praise Negron and the morning Negron was excused from jury duty shortly before a verdict was to be rendered so that he could start campaigning.
It’s been enlightening to me to learn that it’s perfectly legal for the Republican Party to allow votes for one man, Mark Foley, to be re-assigned to another man: Joe Negron, but then this is the state that managed to have votes for Al Gore re-assigned to Pat Buchanan. Nothing should surprise me.
Of course my dislike of Negron isn’t based on my distaste for the party that supported Foley through a decade of hypocrisy, Negron was hosted a few years ago by the local ACLU as part of a panel discussing separation of Church and State, something Negron thinks it just silly. It takes a special kind of mind to declare that the reason this country got rid of slavery was because of Christianity, but that’s a subject to expand upon another day.
Florida has a rare chance to get rid of one more party parasite and I hope we take it. There seems to be some reluctance to support the back-room politics that selected Negron and the men in the back room who made the choice and who protected a pederast for so many years by calling Foley’s critics “Liberals.”
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4 comments:
I guess it's a state by state thing - election law. I thought if ballots were printed and the candidates changed, the recourse was to write in a preferred candidate, not vote for someone who would then transfer those votes to a third party. Bizarro.
Actually it may be better for Democrats this way. I've heard from people who refuse to check Foley's name wheter the vote goes elsewhere or not.
But it shows just how partisan this county is - it's the county that in 2000, allowed the election commissioner to take home the absentee ballots ot "work on them" and this is the county that just let somene out of duty on a sitting jury so that he could pursue his own (and the party's) interests.
I agree that it's totally bizarre that Florida laws allows votes for one candidate to be redirected to a different candidate. I've been searching for some explanation of this (and came upon your blog along the way), without finding any good explanation of the law.
Re the slavery issue: The historical fact is that the anti-slavery movement was predominantly Christian, not just in the US but around the world; and many anti-slavery activists have to be called Christian fanatics. I'm an atheist, but it's still true.
But my point is that the pro-slavery folks were Christian too and perfectly capable of using scripture and Christian tradition to support the practice.
Historically, Christianity was taught to the masses to make them more compliant with feudalism and other forms of slavery from the Roman era onward.
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