I have to wonder why the rest of you are allowed to vote. After all, I’m the only one who knows what’s what. Think of the wonderful world we would have if you just let me decide all the issues.
So now you’re thinking:
Call the men in the white coats. Bring out the straight jacket and prepare the padded cell. Old George has finally lost it.
But that’s exactly the position Republicans are taking. They are systematically trying to prevent groups that might disagree with them from voting. Those groups, of course, include minorities and the poor.
I’m sure I don’t have to go into it. Every day brings new examples of the GOP’s voter exclusion tactics – not just in Washington but in legislatures throughout the land. It has been going on for decades, but – apparently emboldened by the 2010 election results – the wannabe plantation “massas” have ramped up their crusade.
Click here for an example. And here for some background.
This should not be a surprise. The Republican Party represents America’s ruling class, and we all know they have better genes than we do. They’re genetically engineered to rule, and we’re just being wrong headed when we get in their way.
You think I’m joking, right? You’re muttering, “You’re not funny, George.”
But I grew up in Jamaica, before the island achieved independence from England. I know how members of the ruling class there talked about “adult suffrage.” And they thought then just like the Republicans in America think today.
Jamaica has moved forward since then, of course. But it seems America is moving backward.
A report in Salon today exposes the reasoning of one Matthew Vadum (as seen on TV, above). Here’s how the Salon piece begins:
Two days after Rolling Stone posted Ari Berman’s very good piece on how the GOP campaign against ACORN and “voter fraud” is actually just part of a coordinated effort to stop minorities and poor people from voting at all, right-wing “investigative journalist” Matthew Vadum has now explicitly endorsed disenfranchising poor people for the sole reason that they’re poor and will vote for people who will do things to alleviate their poverty. It is positively Swiftian, if Jonathan Swift had been an actual cannibal.
And here’s an example of Vadum’s “findings”:
Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.
Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.
See? I told you conservatives don’t think like you or me, but you probably figured I was being partisan.
Now you know.
