Here it comes: The RNC Meme of the Week

[captainsblog]

It's over, thank gods. Chris Christie auditioning for 2016 and the Paulistas getting screwed over and There Goes Lyin' Ryan and the utter bizareness that was Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair. Did Mittens even technically accept the nomination, or did he just sneak out and head off to Louisiana to ask Bobby Jindal where all the water came from?

All of this was duly reported by the usual-suspect right-wing sources as being American as apple pie and a big rendition of Kumbayah and boy are we gonna show that uppity Obama the door come November.  Those megaphones will all now turn to loaded weapons, though, as the Dems get their turn at conventioneering in Charlotte this week.  I've already seen a preview of the story that will likely take the place of the actual substance of the speeches:



Yup, it's an extension of a riff that our ol' pal Mike Huckabee trotted out a few months ago, where he tried to draw similar parallels to a book signing by the First Lady:


And you know the Democrats will fight any attempt to make photo I.D. laws for voters, saying that it will suppress the vote and disenfranchise the voters. Well, guess what the Massachusetts Democratic convention required to get into their convention? A photo I.D.. But the real head scratcher is the announcement that if you want to attend the book signing of First Lady Michelle Obama's new children's book, you'll have to bring, a photo I.D. and a Social Security number.

Well that tears it. You see, I think that this is nothing more than reader suppression. We are suppressing the rights of people who read books and furthermore, we're disenfranchising the readers of children's books.

Well they say if illegals and dead people ought to vote, we don't need no stinking photo I.D. for that. But if you want to attend a Democratic event or have the First Lady sign your children's book, then you'd better have a photo I.D., or expect to be disenfranchised and suppressed.

Let's use our brains here for a second. (The Huckster and the others who are in on this suppression scheme can borrow mine overnight when I'm not using it.) Attending a convention is not a fundamental right, and the need for the safety of the attendee public officials more than balances the inconvenience.  Getting a book signed is even less of a fundamental right, and the need for the safety of the First Lady, excoriated in the right-wing press as a nation-hating "Moochelle" is especially heightened.  Voting is a fundamental right- perhaps the most fundamental of them. (Yes, even more than the right to go buy assault weapons at a gun show with NO identification and shoot up a movie theater/skyscraper/grocery store/whatever next week's tragedy is gonna be.)

This ID business has been proven, again and again, to be the reddest of red herrings.  Perhaps the best explanation of it came from Aaron Sorkin's finale of The Newsroom- it's fictional, but so is the problem of voter fraud in this country:

So, in the name of solving a problem that doesn't exist, a cadre of Republican state governments have attempted a wholesale purge of the rights and opportunities of Americans to cast ballots by requiring specific forms of ID, favoring those possessed by their base (such as conceal-carry permits) over those possessed by Obama's (such as college ID cards), and restricting registration drives and voting hours in disproportionate ways that, again, favor the richer, more suburban, more connected segments of our society.

Why, I ask, do they not choose to solve the problem that doesn't exist with the solution that would actually solve it?




Instead of messing around with 51 different methods of ensuring voter identity at widely varying costs, isn't it time for a national identity program that would solve this and a lot of other problems all at once?  I fervently wish that we could work together to get such a system in place for the 2016 election season, using current technology from smartphones and QR codes and maybe even a touch of biometrics, to enable every legal voter to freely and easily obtain proof of who they are in time to vote.  The system would be expensive, but the savings in crime reduction and largely-moot immigration enforcement would more than make up for it.

But the wingnuts will never go for it.  Even in the post-9/11 atmosphere of civil liberty reduction, all this country could manage was a "REAL ID" program encouraging, but not requiring, states to obtain heightened proof of citizenship and residency to obtain an "enhanced" driver's license. New York is one of the few to have implemented it, mainly due to our proximity to Canada and the need for either such a license, or federal passport-type ID, to re-enter the country by land.  I have one; so does Emily. It wasn't any more inconvenient to get than getting anything else at the DMV.  But the Paulistas hate it, and they are opposing efforts to expand their use in Florida (a state with histories of both race discrimination and screwing up election results).  The Fundies hate them even more, as they view any move toward national identity proof as a lead-up to the Mark of the Beast and all that 666 shit.

Better to just inconvenience hundreds of thousands of otherwise eligible mostly Democrats out of the franchise. I'm sure they'd tell you that's just God's will.

But not yours. If you're registered, vote. If you're not, get to it before it's too late (and increasingly, under these suppression schemes, it will be.) If your photo ID is out of date, update it.  Call the headquarters office of the political party of your choice if you need help; I'm sure there are Get Out The Vote efforts being directed to this.

And for gods' sake, please help keep Clint Eastwood from being named Secretary of War.

Comments

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

Some folks don't care for Aaron Sorkin. They think he preaches, that he works out his personal relationship problems in his scripts, that he's an ideologue.

I love the man. He makes me proud to be an American. Which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for Mitt Romney.