Voting Rights Are So 1960s

Sometimes I just can’t believe how shameless the GOP is.  That they continue to back a disastrous war that is making their friends rich while killing Iraqi civilians, sending our young soldiers to die and draining our treasury is no surprise.  That they lie to their constituents about the dangers of terrorism and the links between Iraq and Al Qaeda is to be expected.  That they push bad fiscal policy that hurts workers and bankrupts our social programs is par for the course.  And stalling the re-authorization of the Voting Right Act should be shocking, but again, it’s business as usual for the Republican Party.  How silly to think they could have learned anything since the 1960s.

The Republican Party is played out.  They have failed on such a grand scale, if this was any other country, their Party would be done for good.  They have proved that they have no new ideas and their old bag of tricks, including trickle down economics, imperial wars, deregulation and the upward redistribution of wealth, have had the same effect they always did, the rich get richer and the poor, working and middle class get screwed.  At least Republicans are still predictable.

It’s easy for Republican voters to have disdain for government when it works properly.  If the welfare system is working, they can complain about the single mother who keeps having kids just so she can stay on welfare while he “busts his butt every day” working a job that barely pays the bills.  If Social Security is strong and functioning they can complain about the taxes coming out of their checks to pay for those “damn seniors living it up in Florida.”  When the EPA is doing its job, workers can rail against the spotted owl and when the Labor Department is actually protecting workers, they can whine about all the hoops they have to jump through just to keep the doors of their businesses open.  But when Republican leadership in this country has made sure that government doesn’t function, even conservatives kind of miss it.  The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was a disgrace that even embarrassed your average Republican voter.  Government is necessary and everyone wants good government when there’s a disaster.

So what about voting?  If the mid-term elections were held today, there would be a major shift in DC, but unfortunately, we are still four months away from election day, plenty of time to scrub voters from the rolls, manipulate public opinion with their massive propaganda machine (network and cable news), create a few more “terrorist” incidents to get the American people good and scared before they walk into the polling booth and while their at it, why not mess with the Voting Rights Act?  Republicans never wanted black people to vote in the first place.  As shameless as they are, I wouldn’t put it past them to scrap the whole thing now that they’ve got the chance.  It’s a hell of a lot easier than spending all that time and money manipulating, intimidating and disenfranchising all the voters that, as Wolf Blitzer said after Hurricane Katrina, are “so poor and so black.”  If the GOP did decide to scrap The Voting Rights Act, I have no doubt that CNN (and MSNBC, The Washington Post, Fox News and all the rest) would back them up.  Shameless bastards.