"I don’t want everybody to vote," Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority, said while addressing a right-wing Christian audience in 1980. "[O]ur leverage in the elections goes up as the voting populace goes down," he added after he denigrated those who seek "good government" through maximum, informed voter participation as people who suffer from the "goo goo syndrome."
31 years ago. The Repugs have been doing their best to make sure we have an uninformed and uninterested public ever since through their education policies. A surplus of low-wage disposable employees in the workforce as well. It's working.
21st Century voter suppression operates under cover. Or it had, until the new wave of legislation being passed by GOP legislatures across the country began hitting its stride. Until FL's then-governor Charlie Crist overturned it, for example, the state banned convicted felons from voting even years after they'd been released from prison. In Armed Madhouse, Palast asserts that prior to the 2000 Presidential election, FL's then Sec. of State Katherine Harris, appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush, the brother of candidate George W. Bush, purged 94,000 "felons" from the state's computerized voter rolls, though the only "crime" at least 91,000 were guilty of was "being Black, Democrat or both."
The so-called 'Tea Party' is a shell game --- the modern equivalent to "the three minutes of hate" in George Orwell's 1984. The manufactured "birther" controversy, the incessant dehumanizing, and often racist, propaganda about perceived "enemies" (Muslims, immigrants, terrorists, atheists, secularists, communists, liberals) and the myriad of wedge issues, as well as the deception of The Great American Jobhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gifs Scam, are all part of a divide-and-conquer strategy designed to mask thhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gife core goals of the Plutocrat Party, the bulk of which are immensely unpopular.
But deception has its limits, especially when the GOP unmasked its http://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.giftrue agenda in the wake of their 2010 electoral success. That agenda is a devotion to inequality which has produced the greatest wealth disparity since the stock market crash of 1929.
As noted via Wikipedia, in Mein Kampf (1925), Adolf Hitler used the phrase, "the Big Lie" to describe "a lie so 'colossal' that no one would believe that someone 'could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.'"
The fact-free Plutocrats use the "voter fraud" canard so often that it should perhaps qualify as a "Big Lie." That "Big Lie" not only gave rise to the infamous U.S. Attorney firing scandal but an effort to conceal and alter a federal report which exposed "fears of voter fraud" to be "overblown and exaggerated."
Godwin's Law started as humor but is proving to be remarkably accurate when referring to the GOP agenda.
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