Are the Teabaggers really incapable of understanding that the "problem" of voter fraud is a myth?

The "menace" of voter fraud is another of those "truthy" things that sounds like it could be true, maybe even oughtta be true, but alas isn't. Funny how the right-wing apostles of "urban" voter fraud never mention their own very real, very intense years' worth of high-powered election-rigging and -stealing.

"Not only is this legislation anti-democratic, but it comes at a great cost to the state. According to a recent study released by the Democratic National Committee implementation of voter identification will cost Rhode Island between $1.6 -$4.9 million. All to address the myth of voter fraud."

-- statement by Ocean State Action, in response to RI
Gov. Lincoln Chafee's hush-hush signing of two voter-ID bills

by Ken

Lincoln Chafee has never struck me as the strongest-spined of pols, and possibly is so ragdoll-ish that he seems wimpy even when he's doing the macho-patriotic thing. I suppose it doesn't help him that he's equipped with some sort of conscience, a useless appendage for a pol if there ever was one. He knows when he's done something craven and gutless.

So what did the poor dear do over the holiday weekend but try to hide the craven, gutless thing he did Saturday? Yes, he actually kept it hidden until Tuesday afternoon, when his people finally acknowledged that yes, he had signed a bill, or rather two bills, passed on the final day of the legislative session which call for strict ID requirements for Rhode Island voters. (Yes, there are actually two bills, or rather laws now, one initiated by the state's Senate, one by the General Assembly.)

It sounds like a simple blow for democracy, or at least it sounds like this to simpletons, like the Teabaggers, who promptly -- as soon as they heard about it -- hailed the governor for taking "that first step toward freedom from the manipulation of votes meant to benefit politicians and special-interest agendas, particularly in our urban areas." I think it's safe to say that the governor knows perfectly well that this is a "solution" to a "problem" that isn't.

The governor's three days of evasion might have become comical -- if this were in any way humorous. Here's the Providence Journal's Katherine Gregg reporting yesterday afternoon (links onsite):

In the absence of an earlier acknowledgment, the advocacy group Ocean State Action vehemently urged the governor to veto the so-called "voter identification'' bill that, in future elections, will require voters to provide proof of their identity at the polls.

From Ocean State Action came this statement: "On the last day of the session, after an hour and a half of debate and against the strong objections of progressive legislators, the General Assembly passed a voter identification bill that will disenfranchise low-income voters, communities of color, the elderly and students across the state of Rhode Island.

"Not only is this legislation anti-democratic, but it comes at a great cost to the state. According to a recent study released by the Democratic National Committee implementation of voter identification will cost Rhode Island between $1.6 -$4.9 million. All to address the MYTH of voter fraud.'' . . .

A mystified Kate Brock, Ocean State Action's executive director, said she called the governor's office at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday to ask if Chafee had signed the voter identification bills, "and I was told that neither S-400 nor H-5680 had been signed by the Governor. Hence the e-blast.''

In mid-afternoon Tuesday, John Marion, executive director of the citizens' group Common Cause, voiced concern that "there is nothing, nothing on the [General Assembly] or governor's website about this. The GA website doesn't even show it having been transmitted to the governor yet. How can they possibly not tell you whether he has signed it or not?''

At 2:54 p.m. on Tuesday, the governor's office made public a list of the bills that Chafee signed into law Saturday.

So now a blue state, with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature and an Independent governor, has joined the parade of states pretending to uphold democracy -- the Teabaggers' message of appreciation to the Rhode Island legislature and governor described this as -- when anyone with a working brain, starting with the right-wing hoodlums perpetrating this hoax, know full well that the intent is the exact opposite, to step up their already-muscular efforts all over the country to minimize voting by "the wrong kind" of people.

I get that Teabaggers themselves by and large don't understand. They have, after all, at some point made a decision not to try to understand anything about the real world, perhaps to save wear and tear on their delicate brains. By choice, they see nothing beyond the tips of their noses, except for the lying filth concocted for them by the lying devils of the Far Right, who laugh at the grotesque sheep they routinely hornswoggle even as they pull their chains yet again.

But where the demonic forces of the Far Right are involved, reality has ceased to come into it, or anything else. All that matters is the malicious delusions the puppet-masters work so hard to inject into the dormant brains of their stooges. They count on the dopes' insularity, their total unawareness that people of good faith may live lives that differ in any way from theirs, that there are people for whom mounting right-wing restrictions on voting accessibility in terms of polling facilities and hours, not to mention campaigns of coercion and lies about eligibility and hours, may make voting not merely inconvenient but impossible, people for whom the IDs the Teabaggers take for granted may indeed be an onerous burden.

The grotesque truth about the "problem" of voter fraud is that there isn't one. If there were one, by now someone would surely have pointed it out. Even during the intellectual low point of this all-low-points crusade against democracy, the Far Right's gang rape of ACORN for the sin of standing up for non-overprivileged Americans, it was abundantly clear to anyone who had any interest in reality that the voter-registration "scandal" wasn't one, that it resulted from ACORN's own discovery and reporting of paid signer-uppers who were manufacturing registrations for personal profit not ideological advantage, and that not a single fraudulent vote was charged by anyone to have been cast anywhere as a result.

The reality, of course, is that the danger to fair elections comes entirely from those same demons of the Far Right, who over the last decade or two have deployed heroic reserves of manpower and cash to the effort to steal every election they can get their mitts. If as much effort had been spent on, say, curing cancer or achieving world peace, we would all be living to a ripe old age in a world of international harmony.

But of course, for people who have committed themselves to intellectual vacancy, choosing to live as the pawns of liars and thieves, the chances of ever learning any of this are, well, nil.

I'm pretty sure poor Lincoln Chafee understands all of this, just as he understood the destructiveness of the legislative rampage of the Bush regime he witnessed as a Republican member of the U.S. Senate, and understood why his colleague Jim Jeffords decided he could no longer be part of it. I'm sure he suffered in those years, but he -- like his gutless Maine colleagues Olympia Snowe and Suzy Q. Collins -- didn't do a damned thing about it. They didn't just let it happen, they lent their Senate votes to it.

So yes, I expect Governor Chafee knows what it feels like to hold your nose and do something you know is wrong. He's had plenty of practice. And now in his political "second life," he's doing it again. His sop to his conscience, apparently, is that for the three days between his signing of the bills and his office's acknowledgment that he had done so, he could pretend he didn't.

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