17 posts tagged “republican hypocrisy”
Who was it who said, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice..."?
There's no doubt that the incoming administration has its plate more than full with a whole spectrum of disasters. But there is some unfinished business that we can't allow to slip into the memory hole. Over the past eight years untold numbers of people within the U.S. Government have committed crimes of an epic nature. As Ian Welsh at Firedoglake points out:
The SAME people who were responsible for Nixons' crimes, were responsible for Iran/Contra. They and their proteges came back and were responsible for Bush, Iraq, torture, screwing up Katrina and so on.
But we're supposed to let bygones be bygones so they can do it again in the next Republican administration.
If these crimes are allowed to go unpunished, the rule of law will be seriously damaged. This is not about revenge; it's about justice. A desire to "let bygones be bygones" is misguided in an insidious way. That's not bringing us together. That's letting people get away with murder.
Once again we see the Rovian tactic of attacking your opponent on the subject that you are most vulnerable on backfire on the Republicans this election cycle. Via John Cole:
John McCain paid $175,000 of campaign money to a Republican operative accused of massive voter registration fraud in several states, it has emerged.
As the McCain camp attempts to tie Barack Obama to claims of registration irregularities by the activist group ACORN, campaign finance records detailing the payment to the firm of Nathan Sproul, investigated several times for fraud, threatens to derail that argument.
[...]
Mr Sproul has been investigated on numerous occasions for preventing Democrats from voting, destroying registration forms and leading efforts to get Ralph Nader on ballots to leach the Democratic vote.
To which Cole adds:
Only one arrest this election cycle for fraud, and it just so happens to be a guy paid by the McCain/Palin campaign. Funny that. Presumably these crimes were only committed in the pro-America parts of America.
Heh.
There are few, if any, things one can do to undermine democracy that would be worse than denying citizens the right to vote. And yet this is precisely what the Republican Party is trying to do. They figure, if you can't win an election fairly, then steal it. This is something they cannot be allowed to get away with. All this shrieking and hand-wringing from Republicans about ACORN and illegal aliens committing voter fraud is ... well, trying to keep my PG rating, I'll say, balderdash.
As I've mentioned before, this is the very issue at the heart of the U.S. Attorney firing scandal, which has yet to be fully resolved. One of the USAs fired, David Iglesias of New Mexico, described it this way:
"I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted out again," Iglesias told TPMmuckraker. "Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic."
The Obama campaign has responded to this latest round of voter fraud accusations:
"With this voter fraud [investigation], we're seeing an unholy alliance of law enforcement and the ugliest form of partisan politics," Bob Bauer, an elections lawyer with the Obama camp, said on a conference call with reporters just now. Bauer compared the decision to launch the investigation with the US attorneys scandal, in which several US attorneys were fired for their unwillingess to pursue politically charged cases, including voter fraud, with sufficient aggression to satisfy the Bush administration.
Bauer released a letter sent to Attorney General Michael Mukasey calling on him to have the issue taken on by Nora Dannehy, the prosecutor he appointed to investigate the US attorney firings.
The U.S. Supreme Court has also weighed in on the Republican efforts to suppress the vote in Ohio:
The Supreme Court on Friday overturned a lower court’s order requiring state officials in Ohio to supply information that would have made it easier to challenge prospective voters. The decision was a setback for Ohio Republicans, who had sued to force the Ohio secretary of state, a Democrat, to provide information about database mismatches to county officials.
The fact is that the whole voter fraud scare is nothing but smoke and mirrors. It makes no sense if you think about it logically, but of course the Republican Party operatives who promote this are counting on people not thinking about it at all, but simply reacting emotionally to it. Dahlia Lithwick has an excellent article in Slate on the issue, in which she says:
Large-scale, coordinated vote stealing doesn't happen. The incentives—unlike the incentives for registration fraud—just aren't there. In an interview this week with Salon, Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College, who has studied vote fraud systematically, noted that "between 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud. Twenty others were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five were guilty of voting more than once. That's 26 criminal voters." Twenty-six criminal voters despite the fact that U.S. attorneys, like David Iglesias in New Mexico, were fired for searching high and low for vote-fraud cases to prosecute and coming up empty. Twenty-six criminal voters despite the fact that five days before the 2006 election, then-interim U.S. Attorney Bradley Schlozman exuberantly (and futilely) indicted four ACORN workers, even when Justice Department policy barred such prosecutions in the days before elections. RNC General Counsel Sean Cairncross has said he is unaware of a single improper vote cast because of bad cards submitted in the course of a voter-registration effort. Republican campaign consultant Royal Masset says, "[I]n-person voter fraud is nonexistent. It doesn't happen, and ... makes no sense because who's going to take the risk of going to jail on something so blatant that maybe changes one vote?"
That doesn't stop the McCain-Palin campaign from trying to use ACORN as a boogeyman to whip up anger on the right. Plus, it goes hand in hand with their demonization of illegal aliens. Anonymous Liberal puts it in perspective:
Some suggest that this willing army of criminals might be recruited from the ranks of illegal aliens or unnaturalized citizens, people who are not eligible to vote. That's nonsense. Illegal aliens live in constant fear of being discovered and deported. Good luck getting an illegal alien to submit a registration form much less actually go to a polling station. And legal residents have very similar fears. Voter fraud is a deportable offense. These folks value their immigration status more than anything in the world and would never risk it in order to cast a vote.
And now the right-wing fringe is acting on the provocation from McCain and Palin by threatening and vandelizing ACORN offices. These kinds of tactics deserve to wind up on the trash heap of history. There's nothing honorable or American about it.
From McClatchy:
As the economy worsens and Election Day approaches, a conservative campaign that blames the global financial crisis on a government push to make housing more affordable to lower-class Americans has taken off on talk radio and e-mail.
Commentators say that's what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They've specifically targeted the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie's and Freddie's financial problems.
Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren't true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis. [Emphasis added]
Once again the Republicans seek to blame the victim and distract from the real perpetrators of the crime. You really can't believe anything they say. It's clear that predatory lending practices and toothless government regulation are the real culprits.
I wrote previously about the connection between Republican claims of "Voter Fraud" and the U.S. Attorney firings. This is looking to become a key part of what passes for strategy in the Republican campaign. It's important that we get this story straight and don't get suckered by it again. An important distinction is the difference between "Voter Fraud" and "Voter Registration Fraud." From Daily Kos:
In other words, what is occurring (and what isn't unique to this election) is isolated incidents of voter registration fraud. Fraud is also being committed on ACORN, an organization that is being tricked into paying volunteers for these fake registrations (clarification: ACORN pays its volunteers by the hour, not per registration). Voter fraud has not occurred. Mickey Mouse isn't show up to vote, even if he did "fill out" a registration form. And if someone registered more than once? They can only vote once at the polling booth once their name is checked off.
But pesky facts like that mean little to certain Republicans who see McCain's plunging numbers and who are looking for any reason--other than the failure of conservatism--to blame for a possible crushing electoral defeat.
So in spite of the fact that some individuals have definitely been guilty of submitting false voter registrations for profit, examples of someone actually casting a fraudulent vote are almost non-existent. Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill had this to say:
"There has been no fraudulent voting...The people who claim this is a huge problem can never produce any instances where anyone voted fraudulently. They have registered fraudulently.
"Anyone who is registering someone who is not a real person should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," McCaskill said, but she did not accept the accusation that the apparently bogus registrations were "clogging" the system.
This is another red herring from the Republicans designed to distract Americans from the reality they see around them.
With poll after poll in the last couple of weeks showing Obama-Biden with a widening lead over McCain-Palin, McCain's campaign has taken a particularly nasty turn. Unable to present a coherent message about the economic meltdown, jumping erratically from one tactic to another, both McCain and Palin have been trying to attack Obama with appeals to fear and hate that are truly disgraceful. The connection to former 60s Weatherman, William Ayers, that they are putting so much emphasis on is an irrelavent distraction. For some first hand, authoritative comment see this letter to the NY Times from William C. Ibershof, who was the lead prosecutor on the Weathermen case in the 70s:
I am amazed and outraged that Senator Barack Obama is being linked to William Ayers’s terrorist activities 40 years ago when Mr. Obama was, as he has noted, just a child.
Although I dearly wanted to obtain convictions against all the Weathermen, including Bill Ayers, I am very pleased to learn that he has become a responsible citizen.
Because Senator Obama recently served on a board of a charitable organization with Mr. Ayers cannot possibly link the senator to acts perpetrated by Mr. Ayers so many years ago.
That this tenuous association is being used in campaign advertising is bad enough, but McCain and Palin are beating this issue like a drum at their campaign rallies, working their supporters into a frenzy, and making many people very concerned, such as Joe Klein:
Watch the tape of the guy screaming, "He's a terrorist!" McCain seems to shudder at that, he rolls his eyes... and I thought for a moment he'd admonish the man. But he didn't. And now he's selling the Ayres non-story full-time. Yes, yes, it's all he has. True enough: he no longer has his honor. But we are on the edge of some real serious craziness here and it would be nice if McCain did the right thing and told his more bloodthirsty supporters to go home and take a cold shower. But McCain hasn't done the right thing all year. His campaign is appalling, as the New York Times editorial board said today--and more, it is a national disgrace.
And this from Glenn Greenwald:
Just look at the videotapes of the angry, hateful hordes attending these rallies — screaming that Obama is a socialist; that he’s both a Muslim and a terrorist as proven by his “bloodline” and his name; that his supporters are “commie faggots”; that he’s guilty of treason; underscored by increasing racial invective and even punctuated in one case by a call from an audience member for someone to be killed. These aren’t just isolated individuals; these sentiments are common at these rallies and becoming increasingly virulent and enraged — at the rallies and otherwise:
Here's what makes this tactic truly reprehensible: McCain knows the accusations aren't true, any more than the allegation made in the 2000 campaign that he had fathered an illigitimate black baby. But he is allowing certain people, represented by the crowds at their recent campaign rallys, to believe they are true in hopes of gaining a political advantage. Disgraceful.
An almost unchallenged tenet of the McCain campaign is John McCain's unwavering support for American military personnel. McCain said in the first presidential debate:
"... I know the veterans, I know them well, and I know that they know that I'll take care of them, and I have been proud of their support and their recognition of my service to the veterans, and I love them, and I'll take care of them, and they know that I'll take care of them."
Brandon Friedman at VetVoice takes exception:
This statement--made near the end of Friday's debate--immediately infuriated veterans across America and overseas. In fact, Senator John McCain has a very clear, long, and illustrious history of not supporting troops and veterans one bit.
Friedman has compiled an extensive list of McCain's record on issues related to active military, veterans' issues, and foreign policy that is really damning. It's much too long to summarize, you can see it here. According to Crooks and Liars:
Seriously, you’ll want to read and cite this list often. His support for veterans and troops is a big part of McCain’s pitch but in reality it’s simply mythology created out of whole cloth.
TPMMuckraker has an analysis of the new report on the White House involvement in the firing of the U.S. Attorneys. Here's a sample:
The White House's active involvement in the firings, as depicted in the report, can be divided into two broad categories: First, its role in initiating and promoting the overall plan to remove an unspecified number of U.S. attorneys -- traditionally treated as apolitical prosecutors who operate independently from the political agenda of the administration -- deemed insufficiently committed to the Bush agenda. And second, its apparent work in pushing specifically for several of the most high-profile dismissals.
This story got lost in all the bad economic news and the presidential campaign. The politicization and perversion of the Justice Department that has taken place under the Bush/Cheney administration must be reversed. And that's going to involve some prosecutions.
There is a new report out from the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law about the practice of purging voter rolls to supposedly prevent "voter fraud." But what's wrong, you may ask, with making sure the voter roles only contain legitimate voters? If only it were that simple. From the report via Digby:
Voter Purges finds four problematic practices with voter purges that continue to threaten voters in 2008: purges rely on error-ridden lists; voters are purged secretly and without notice; bad "matching" criteria mean that thousands of eligible voters will be caught up in purges; and insufficient oversight leaves voters vulnerable to erroneous or manipulated purges.
Digby adds:
Much of this "purging" is undoubtedly innocent. But when you have national vote suppression projects like those initiated by the Republican National Lawyers Association, scandals like the US Attorney firings around the same issues, and a decades long campaign to create a sense of crisis around something that doesn't exist in any meaningful way --- voter fraud --- this kind of thing becomes a lot more suspicious.
As I've noted before, pressing bogus voter fraud cases was at the heart of the U.S. Attorney firings currently under investigation. This insidious practice is nothing more than an underhanded attempt to subvert the democratic process while claiming to protect it. It's something we should all be on the lookout for in November.
One of the basic techniques for understanding a point of view that's different from your own is to reverse the roles in a particular situation and see what the result does to your preconceptions. That's the basis for an email making the rounds right now. Jeralyn at Talk Left reprints it. Here's an excerpt:
How Racism Works
What if John McCain were a former president of the Harvard Law Review?
What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?
What if McCain were still married to the first woman he said "I do" to?
What if Obama were the candidate who left his first wife after she no longer measured up to his standards?
What if Michelle Obama were a wife who not only became addicted to pain killers, but acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?
What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?
What if Obama were a member of the "Keating 5"?
What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?
A commenter takes exception:
There were many comments like this. They are missing the point of the exercise: it's not whether going to Harvard is better than going to the University of Idaho, the point is that it would make for a huge change in perception of any of the behavior mentioned depending on whether it was a wealthy white person doing it as opposed to a working class black person. You have to grasp that difference to appreciate the significance of Barack's candidacy.Since most Americans didn't even finish college, They do not care who went to Harvard and who went to Podunk University and who went to none of the above. We sounds like snobs and elitists when we make arguments like these.
