Democracy In Action, In Reverse

Sure, Mitt Romney lies pervasively, and he'll repeat, dutifully and Pavlovian, any meme (don't watch it: you'll puke) produced by the Foxorovian wing (is it a wing when it represents the whole turkey?) of the R party; but I think the most telling and damning exemplar of who that party really is is their overt efforts at voter suppression. When you know in your heart that what you stand for is a lie, is good only for one percent of the country, when you understand you can't win by making your case honestly, you lie, and you keep the people who can't be fooled from voting. You demand voter ID for those who can't access it, and you call it fraud prevention. (Yes, Jon Stewart just did a thing about it, and I've written about it before: but, central as it is to democracy, it can never be said enough.)

Facts have never mattered to teabaggRs. And it's a fact, produced over and over, and even by Rs themselves, that voter fraud is a non-issue in the US. A study by R lawyers, who support voter suppression efforts, found that, over the last ten years, the number of fraudulent votes averages oh-point-seven cases per state per year. Seriously. And some were registration fraud, which never made it to the voting booth. It's a non-issue. When Rs in Pennsylvania were asked, in court, to show the need for their laws, they admitted they had no evidence either of past fraud or that their law would prevent it. (It will, however, prevent potentially hundreds of thousands of legitimate votes.) And yet, if you listen to Fox "news" and the rest of the RWS™, you'd think it's rampant. They lie, and lie again, and their sheepified listeners, heads bowed, swallow it like it's eucharist.

There's no secret. It's not subtle. Convinced their message is weak and their ideas have no merit, today's Rs are engaged in a cynical, undemocratic (in both senses) campaign to prevent legitimate Democratic voters from participating fairly in elections. That's what's behind it. It tells you everything about the party that produces a Mitt Romney as its standard-bearer; that runs a propaganda network and calls it news. That kowtows to Rush Limbaugh and spends billions to brainwash teabaggers and convince them they're thinking for themselves. The laws they're producing, only in R-controlled legislatures around the country, are aimed at keeping honest, legal, minorities, poor people, and the elderly from voting. People they figure -- correctly -- that tend to vote Democratic.

Loving their country like no other group, today's Rs are acting like the countries they claim sent Obama here to destroy us. Claiming sole and unique fealty to our American values, they show disdain for the most central of them all, the right to vote. In every way, at every level, they expose themselves as the party of dishonesty, of fear of democracy, of cynicism. Voter fraud: it doesn't exist. Voter suppression: absent the ability to win on the merits of their arguments, it's what they bank on.

People who call themselves conservative should reject these efforts as if their country depended on it. Because it does. But, given that within today's R party there are few to no true conservatives, few who've not been bamboozled by Foxorovian lies, it wouldn't matter if they did.

If I were a conservative (and, on some matters, I sort of am), I'd be embarrassed to call myself a Republican today. I'd look at the liar they produced and the lies they tell, the efforts they're making to destroy democracy (their economic policies will do it, too, in addition to their anti-voting efforts) and replace it with oligarchy, and I'd tell myself enough is enough. These aren't good people. They're not honest people. They're not people who look at America and see it as a nation of shared needs and ideals.

And they're sure as hell not conservatives. They look at our country and see it not as a melting-pot but as a pot of gold from which to steal, and steal, until there's nothing left. Sort of like Mitt Romney at Bain Capital. A model for self-aggrandizement at the expense of others; and because of the former, they couldn't care less about the latter.