Wednesday, May 28, 2008

The Holy Grail, the lost Ark and voter fraud

One of the problems with the religious neurosis is that it seeks the sanctuary of belief so avidly that evidence for a thousand demons and a thousand thousand plots spring forth from the minds of believers, like Athena from the head of Zeus. As with the Great Reagan's invented "welfare mother" who lacked only actual existence to be an example of the abuse he believed in, the prophets of the Republican cult, as we see in the closing scenes of Recount, can see voter fraud issuing like a stink from the unwashed minorities they believe compose the Democratic base. It's easy to turn their crimes into virtues when they are seen as efforts to contain a greater evil; greater because it's done by the other, the heretic, the minority, the smelly brown tide kept at bay only by the heroes of elitism Liberty: the Republican Faithful.

So it is that the Republican struggle against the dragon of "Liberal" voter fraud remains as Dahlia Lithwick (Newsweek June 2, 2008) dubs the Supreme Court's decision to uphold Indiana's voter ID law: a solution in search of a problem. The problem is creating evidence of significant incidences of inellegible voters casting ballots and as these would undoubtedly be voters with accents and little money, casting ballots for Democrats.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing of "flagrant" examples, included a 140 year old New York mayoral election and a single Washington incident in 2004. No mention was made of the disenfranchisement of perhaps 50,000 Florida voters in 2000.

Will the Indiana photo-ID requirement keep legitimate voters from participating in elections? I won't indulge in the willful confusion of possibility with probability. I simply don't know that it will or won't. I don't know how many indigents or elderly shut-ins simply don't have passports or Drivers licenses or State issued photo-ID cards. I do know of one very visible case in Palm Beach Florida where the evidence is iron-clad, but the prominent Republican polemicist who committed it wasn't prosecuted. I will venture a guess that some 85 year old black woman from Indiana who doesn't drive a car would be turned away at least and made into a criminal at worst, under the same circumstances. We shall see if voter ID laws are one more tool of repression and authoritarianism in due time. There's no appeal possible from the decisions of a Supreme Court stuffed with Republican activists anyway.

6 comments:

Intellectual Insurgent said...

This entire issue of voter fraud is a hoax. The elites (Republicans and Democrats) are working hard at creating a police state and the only way to get people to accept some national ID program is to come up with some patriotic reason why it's necessary.

Faux debates about fraudulent votes is pure political theatre designed to keep the sheeple distracted while the gestapo work hard at reshaping the system.

Capt. Fogg said...

absolutely

d.K. said...

Off topic:

I wonder if your former occasional commenter, the one who "drank the cool-aid" and challenged you some months back to cite one, single instance where GW Bush had lied, still reads your blog... I wonder what her/his reaction to the Scott McClellan book is?

Though he's a hypocrite at best, I have no reason not to believe his accounts our purposeful lying to get us into war in Iraq. Some of us with partial long term memories, remember the war rhetoric aimed at Iraq long before 9/11.

I've said it before and I still believe that History will be very unkind (deservedly) to Bush. He may be immune to history's contempt, but his offspring and those of his collaborators will endure the shame by association for a long, long time...

Capt. Fogg said...

I'm currently contending with a similar troll who tries to substitute cynicism and faux outrage for wit and wisdom, but who knows where trolls go when the go away? I'm happy enough just to have them leave.

They never do come back and admit error, do they? Whether they don't because of shame or whether they simply can't get past the absolute certainty or their faith based opinions, I don't know.

I hope history is unkind, but you never know. General Custer was a hero for at least 80 years and who can say how long the new cult of liberalhate will last.

I would be happier if the present were more unkind to the bastard.

The Future Was Yesterday said...

Interesting post, and comments as well. Blogger Intellectual Insurgent said what I was going to say. Re history: will that be the written kind, the revised written kind, or the actual events in the mind and memory of us who had to be there? Because we're already seeing the first two in mass quanities.

Capt. Fogg said...

Fake history seems to be a large part of our culture, from Mike Meyers' fake version of the 1960's to fake stories about the hero Reagan. All the current generation has to go on is fake history.

And then there's the stupid version -- with more than half of high school kids thinking Germany was our ally in WW II and not having a clue what Pearl Harbor was about.