In the November election, Roxanne Rubin, a 56 year-old Nevada Republican and casino worker, took it upon herself to prove the need for voter ID laws in her state. She attempted to make a name for herself and for her cause, to illuminate the nation about the rampant vote stealing that is underway in this country. Instead, she got herself arrested for voter fraud.
Republican bubble meets reality.
Gee who could voter ID laws effect anyway?
Rubin succeeded in making a name for herself and her cause. Unfortunately, the name was Hugh G. Embarrassment and it is, and should be, the rallying cry to curb any and all efforts to expand voter ID laws.
Here you have the perfect case and point. Lady tries to vote twice in a state with no Voter ID laws, gets caught, goes to jail briefly, walks the line of public humiliation and is forced to pay a huge fine and legal fees. And to think we had no faith in the system!
As someone who has seen many of the inner-workings of the System from local government to education, from justice to the jails, from social services to the electoral process, I can testify, I am no fan of government. Yet I am no fan of the phone companies either and I deplore insurance companies, so I can tell you with certainty that while certain swaths of the government, and private sector for that matter, need massive improvement, they are far from collapsing under their own weight any time soon and provide a service we really can’t live without. In other words: while the electoral process needs improvement, the problems do not include sending voters away because they don’t have an ID.
Voter ID laws were a massive attempt to steal states like Pennsylvania from Democrats and deliver them to Republican Romney, and will continue to be a way to disenfranchise the already disenfranchised voters who wish to make their voice heard. Oh but don’t take my word for it, listen to the words of Pennsylvania House majority leader Republican Mike Turzai says voter ID “is gonna allow Governor Romney to win” the presidency.”
Yet it backfired. Why? Perhaps because record numbers of African-Americans voted in record numbers because nothing motivates people to vote like trying to take their hard-fought voice away. Seriously, if you have to cheat to win, you’ll eventually lose. I suppose try telling that to Al Gore, though, more importantly, try telling that to generations of Americans who were forced to endure Jim Crow laws in the South and economic Apartheid in the North.
And yet… the wobbly beat goes on!
The problem with the electoral process is that half the country doesn’t vote, poor districts have voter machines that are inferior and white Republican administrations are doing everything they can to count less of the votes of minorities and the poor, often resorting to illegal tactics like they used in the Florida 2000 election (sending people with names that are similar to felons, who can’t vote, away for no reason other than they are from poor areas). This is why poor Americans and college students wait in lines for 4 hours to vote while suburbanites are in and out in 5 minutes.
Yet how can we reform the system when Republicans focus so much of the attention towards made up boogie-men like ACORN, which half of Republicans believe stole the 2012 election for Obama? This is ridiculous to begin with, since ACORN was nothing more than a tiny non-profit that tried to get minorities to register to vote, yet is even more ridiculous because ACORN hasn’t even existed in years. It shut down shortly after their own right-wing wacko prankster James O’Keefe faked a whole pimp scandal. You might have seen it in the news when it broke, yet I’ll bet you didn’t see that the man accused was completely vindicated and James O’Keefe was determined to be using deceptive editing that cut out the man calling the cops on him. You can read more about it here.
My point is that there is this whole fantasy-land that conservatives live in where crime has never been worse, America has never been weaker, Obama is turning this country into a socialist, Marxist, Fascist, Gorbechevist, paradise and minorities are running rampant, using their black pimp president to hand them all welfare checks and government jobs. Every one of those statements is so far from the truth you really have to wonder where these people are getting their “facts” from. (cough) FOX! (cough). Oh sorry, about that. Not sure why I typed out my cough there but I did.
It’s called the bubble, a right-wing wonderland where everything really sucks. Where the news is always terrible when a Democrat is in office and gleefully blissful during a Republican administration, despite those years sucking pretty hard for the rest of us who, ya know, hate war and torture and handouts to big corporations, but I digress. Republicans put all their faith, hope and stock into said bubble and threw in a few conspiracy theories for good measure. Today it is so overloaded with bulls**t it is like a lead balloon, dragging their party and cause of tax-cuts for rich people and liberty for “job creators” aka rich a**sholes, deep into the oblivion where it belongs.
While the think-tanks in Washington that write the conservative playbook, and all those snappy talking points they regurgitate like mindless zombies, tried to rally the legitimate anger against the banks into a force that ended up fighting for expanded rights for the banks, they didn’t anticipate the hornet’s nest they stirred up. All those crack pots like Beck and Limbaugh became the intellectuals of conservatism, replacing such esteemed intellectuals like William F. Buckley and Richard Pearl. Anti-communist paranoia was overplayed and ironically, America did learn something from the McCarthy era. America was scared off by these lunatics and it ended up backfiring on the GOP. What ended up happening was the Tea Party morphed into the extreme right, so far out of the mainstream that they became a liability, now less popular than ever.
It’s all we got folks, seriously!
People like Roxanne Rubin are nothing more than groupies of a rock band that plays a sour and horrible whinny pitched sound (fans of Emo I guess). They bought into the whole “America is going down the drain” argument despite the fact that this message is so divisive and so pessimistic it couldn’t be more un-American. Many of these paranoids believed in the Biblical end of days that is approaching. They stock-pile guns for that day when Obama’s policies will cause the nation to collapse and roving gangs would show up to enact a scene straight out of Mad Max. Well I hope they have craft services, because the only way that this fantasy will come to life is if they hire actors to play it out.
That is the real tragedy about what is happening here, and I’m talking about right-wing movies like Atlas Shrugged Part 1 and 2, or those awful Kirk Cameron movies Left Behind, Left Behind: World at War (how can the rapture have a sequel?) and Growing Pains: Return of the Seavers, this is a far graver issue. I really have no problem with somebody believing in paranoid delusions, it’s their right to do so. If they want to drop acid and call themselves Superman, even take to wearing a cape, I don’t care. It’s when this guy goes up on a building, jumps tragically to his death, hurting people down below and causing enormous expenditures of government resources in the process, that this man’s delusion suddenly becomes everyone’s problem, and that is not right, neither for him or the rest of us.
See, we are all in this together, whether we like it or not. The right-wing is so far gone these days that they may not be able to come back from their delusions. It is the other half of the Republican party that I care about bringing back to the blue skies of reality and away from the purple haze of ignorant insanity. Stay Republicans, make a new party, even become Democrats, whatever, anything is better than clogging the already congested arteries of Washington. I may have to amend my earlier statement, while local and even state governments seem to at least function, Washington IS nearing critical mass with the Tea Party in there. Honestly, if we get any more obstruction, Washington just may have a heart-attack, and since it is the life blood of our democracy, that doesn’t bode well.
Roxanne Rubin, the lady who tried to vote twice and only proved that the system works, found out the hard way about reality. She got a first-class taste of our jails, which are filled with the poor, of our legal system and its horrible pro-wealthy state while ultimately having to come to terms with the cold-hard facts that the delusions the right-wing put in her head were no better than a bad acid trip. Welcome back to the land of blue skies and green grass Roxanne!