Don't kid yourself: the Republican party's decision yesterday to "delay" the renewal of the Voting Rights Act has not a darn thing to do with objections of the Republican's white sheets caucus.
Complaints by a couple of good ol' boys to legislation have never stopped the GOP leadership from rolling over dissenters.
This is a strategic stall that is meant to decriminalise the Republican party's new game of challenging voters of colour by the hundreds of thousands.
In the 2004 presidential race, the GOP ran a massive, multi-state, multimillion-dollar operation to challenge the legitimacy of black, Hispanic and Native American voters. The methods used breached the Voting Rights Act, and while the Bush administration's civil rights division grinned and looked the other way, civil rights lawyers began circling, preparing to sue to stop the violations of the act before the 2008 race.
So Republicans have promised to no longer break the law - not by going legit but by eliminating the law.
The act was passed in 1965 after the Ku Klux Klan and other upright citizens found they could use procedural tricks - "literacy tests", poll taxes and more - to block citizens of colour from casting ballots.
The Republicans target black folk not because they don't like the colour of their skin; they don't like the colour of their vote: Democrat. For that reason, the GOP included on its hit list Jewish retirement homes in Florida. Apparently, the GOP was also gunning for the Elderly of Zion.
These so-called "fraudulent" voters, in fact, were not fraudulent at all. Page after page, as we have previously reported, are black soldiers sent overseas. The Bush campaign used their absence from their US homes to accuse them of voting from false addresses.
Republicans argue that the racial voting games and the threats of the white-hooded Klansmen that kept African-Americans from the ballot box before the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act no longer threaten black voters.
That's true. When I look over the "caging lists" and the "scrub sheets", it's clear to me that the GOP has traded in white sheets for spreadsheets.
Those of us who are old enough to remember the '60s and the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. King, desegregation of schools, the elimination of Jim Crow laws, the Voting Rights Act, and the resistance of white Southerners (and, to be fair, many others) to doing the Right Thing (moral values) , from police oppression to murder, are absolutely appalled at the "delay" in renewing this act.
A lot of pain and sacrifice on the part of many correct-thinking, fair-minded, truly moral Americans is about to go up in smoke at the hands of the Republican criminal elite.
Palast is right: racism is still with us, but it's no longer strictly about color. Now it's about retaining power at all costs. The Republicans need all the help they can get. They know every dirty trick in the book and are in a position at this time to use them with impunity.
This is just another in a long list of reasons to throw 'em out in the street come November.
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