If Gore had won Kentucky. . .

That Al Gore lost the state of Kentucky in the 2000 Presidential election was a bit of a surprise to some of us. Polls had him up as much as 8%, but of course he lost that state and his loss was accompanied by jeers, of course. Republicans love to hate Al Gore although some have since begun to love Lieberman. They'd also love to forget all the accusations of voter fraud and the way they excoriated all who were suspicious that those voting machines with no means to check whether they had been hacked or not might have in fact, been tampered with in several states. Sore losers, we were called by the smug victors who currently are sore losers to the point of threatening us all with violence and insurrection.

In a country with a memory, the mockery might haunt Republicans, but of course they live in the moment and reality is created anew every day to suit each day's requirements. The conviction of a former judge and seven others on Thursday gives renewed strength to the argument that the electoral victory in 2000 and perhaps the Bush-Kerry contest were influenced or decided by corrupt Republicans. former Circuit Judge R. Cletus Maricle and former school Superintendent Douglas C. Adams along with five others were convicted of a federal racketeering conspiracy and several of them of other charges, including mail fraud, extortion and laundering the money that was used to buy votes.

Some of the juries are still out but the mockery, the Liberal bashing, the accusations of treason are sounding more and more off key as we move forward from the 8 year reign of the Right and we have to speculate on what might have been, for better or for worse if the corrupt and unscrupulous, with all the lip service paid to freedom, had had respect for the law and tolerance of Democracy.

Mighty Oaks

From little acorns grow; some pretty tall tales too. It' s begun to taper off, but still I hear sotto voce advice from people revealing that ACORN got Obama elected and their efforts weren't exactly on the up and up. I hear it often.

Of course we remember John McCain's exercises in the fallacy of distraction, one of which had Obama tied to massive voter fraud and ACORN thereby negating his large lead in the polls. Nobody has a better motive for alleging voter fraud than someone with a documented history of cheating of course. There were indeed thousands of bad signatures in the million or so registrations the group submitted, but of course the idea that the folks who signed up as Mighty Mouse and Bugs Bunny ever actually tried to vote under that name is laughably devoid of evidence. Some of the dung flung at Obama still sticks however, even after demonstrations of how easy it has been to erase blocks of votes along with any evidence of the erasure from Diebold machines.

Obama won so handily that the question is now moot if not exactly forgotten. His alleged connections with the organization never really materialized and the pot and pan banging hoopla didn't survive the dip into the frigid water of defeat. But the snickerers and nudgers and whisperers still wink and raise their eyebrows, knowing We'd never have Obama without ACORN.

So what's that subversive, anti-American, Liberal crew of cheats and conspirators up to now? Why, nefarious attempts to help a disabled vet keep his house from being foreclosed and renegotiate his loan before he's tossed out, wheelchair and all. How typical! How Marxist! How hard to reconcile it with the Republican bullshit about supporting the troops and about how "liberals" don't. Those damned Liberals!

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.