There’s a blog I’ve just discovered that I like very much. It’s called Orcinus, although it’s URL isn’t anything that remotely resembles that, and other than as the Latin term for a killer whale (I think) I don’t know what Orcinus means, or why this blogger is applying the title (if I’m understanding it correctly) to his blog.
I mean, for all I know, it’s a Tolkien reference. But I like this guy’s writing very much. If you want to find the blog, it comes up first after a Google search on ‘Orcinus’. I could paste a link, but it’s way more trouble than I want to go to right now. Sorry.
Anyway, everything I’ve seen on this guy’s blog is worth reading (I’m especially enjoying the way he’s been bitch slapping Michelle Malkin all over the place lately) but here’s what I wanted to write about a bit – an entry from November 7 2005 which he opens with:
- the right of American citizens to vote, or
-- preventing those who are ineligible to vote from doing so.
Now, think of this as a kind of Rohrschach test: The answer you give is neither right nor wrong. But it does tell us a great deal -- about your politics, about your priorities, and about what kind of American you are.
First, I suspect he’s spelling ‘Rorschach’ wrong, but it’s a tough word and maybe Alan Moore spelled it incorrectly all through WATCHMEN, I don’t know. But I’m more interested in the essential principle he is exploring here, because as with many seemingly simple questions, I can’t pick either A) or B).
What I think is primarily important, in terms of enacting a civil and functional democracy in which liberal values like individual freedom will continue to flourish in a meaningful fashion, is not letting fools vote.
It is, in my opinion, very much that simple. When you let fools vote, you get… well, you get the last five years. And in this context, it does not matter that the administration that has been screwing up America and much of the rest of the globe for the last five years did not actually legitimately win any elections. That administration could not have stolen any elections, either, if 50 million or so fools hadn’t genuinely and sincerely voted for them.
Let me digress here for a moment and mention something that a conservative troll recently wrote to me in an email I pretty much deleted after reading about the third sentence, but which, nonetheless, remains with me. Essentially, this person indicated to me that I had no right to say things on this blog like “Bush stole the election” unless I was going to back my statements up with pertinent quotes from specific election law. Let me say this to that:
First, no, you are confused. I have an inalienable human and individual right to say any goddam thing I feel like saying at any time. I don’t have to support it with a single frickin’ thing, and if you want evidence that this is true, please go spend five minutes listening to Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter, or Michelle Malkin. If people had no right to express unsubstantiated and utterly retarded bullshit without some kind of reasonable support, every conservative mouthpiece in America would be in the Big House right now.
Now, having said that, no, I am not comparing my work to that of any of those people, I am comparing my RIGHTS to those enjoyed by those people. Get that straight before we move on.
Second, let me also add this: in my experience, when conservatives ask liberals to please support any statement in regard to the illegitimacy of Bush’s presidency by quoting something or providing some sort of factual evidence, well, they do not mean it. What they are hoping for is the opportunity to say “Well, the Supreme Court SAID it was legitimate and they are the highest law in the land, SO THERE!!!” Conservatives love to say this about the Supreme Court, which is, according to conservatives, absolutely unimpeachable on every subject involving the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections, and only becomes error ridden and addle headed when we take up the subject of legalized abortion and gun control laws.
If I were to take that bait and start listing off all the various acts of Republican thuggery and (to use the Nixonian term) ratfucking that were enacted during the 2000 and 2004 campaigns and elections in order to steal the elections, which range from sending thugs in Halliburton and Enron funded planes to Florida to stage violent demonstrations outside recount sites in order to shut them down, through sending mass mailing to predominantly black neighborhoods claiming that election day for Democrats had been moved to Wednesday because high turnout was expected at the polls, to, most likely, reprogramming the Diebold electronic voting machines to hugely pad Republican vote margins wherever possible (resulting on occasion in various Ohio counties recording significantly more Republican votes than the last census recorded living residents), well, conservatives then start to haw and harrumph about how none of that is proven, and anyway, Democrats don’t have the cleanest electioneering record either, and , and, well, the Diebold thing is a ridiculous urban legend, and besides, isn’t it time to put all that in the past and stop indulging in the politics of hateful discord and come together as a country and a nation to solve the very real problems that we all face together, like legalized abortion and gay marriage and all those hateful dope smoking liberal traitors who are causing us to lose the War on Terror?
All of this is largely why instead of bothering to reiterate in detail any of the reams, droves, drifts, and/or tractor trailer truckfuls of inarguable documentation proving irrefutably that Bush did indeed steal the 2000 and 2004 elections, I simply say things like “Bush stole the 2004 election” and move on. All us sane people know that Bush stole the 2004 election, and those of us sane people who are liberal will actually admit to it. Conservatives, on the other hand, can be divided into two groups in regard to this subject – the intelligent and sane ones, who also know Bush stole the election and who have no actual problem with that because they think it's pretty cool, actually, but who won’t admit it because, well, they know other people don't agree with that, and the emotional retards who still can’t admit we are not winning in Iraq and we will not ever win in Iraq using conventional combat techniques.
(This is a lesson you would have expected nearly everyone to have learned after Vietnam, but if everyone had learned that lesson, I imagine we would never have invaded Iraq in the first place, so clearly, there are a lot of people out there who still just don’t comprehend the notion that in guerilla warfare, it doesn’t matter who has the most expensive toys, all that matters is who is willing to do the nastiest stuff… and in this particular war, the religious crazies who are willing to die for Allah if they can take a lot of the enemy with them have a large advantage over the fat decadent lazy imperialists, who want to live to go back home and watch Internet porn while they drink beer and get blowjobs from the next door neighbor’s girlfriend when he’s at work.)
Now, it’s pointless to argue with the smart, sane conservatives, because, as I say, they already know Bush stole the election and they have no shame regarding it, however, they are never going to admit it, either. And, to paraphrase Heinlein, it is pointless to try to teach anything to a cretin; it wastes your time and annoys the cretin. Conservative cretins are often well armed, so, all the way around, it’s just a bad idea.
Back to the subject at hand: I do not feel we should allow fools to vote. Now, I know, you are going to say “well, that’s a subjective interpretation, everybody is foolish about something from someone else’s point of view, unless you can impose some kind of objective definition of ‘fool’, you’re wasting everybody’s time”. And I agree with you, which is why I have an objective definition of fool for you that is, in my mind, inarguable:
Anyone who voted for Bush in 2004 is a fool, and must never ever be allowed to vote again in any sort of democratic election.
Look, people can argue that they had valid reasons for voting for Bush in 2000. I personally disagree with every single one of those reasons, and actually think they all border on being abjectly retarded, but still, I’m biased and I’ll grudgingly concede that, yeah, I can see how some people might have thought the country was heading in the wrong direction after 8 years of Clinton and feel we needed some sort of change. Those people are trusting gullible emotional morons who are, apparently, perfectly willing to base their vote on an individual’s sexuality and then blame an entire political party/social philosophy for that sexuality… which is a fancy way of saying, these guys decided they were disgusted because a married Democrat got a blowjob from someone who wasn’t his spouse while in office, so they decided to vote for a Republican instead. And I think that’s pretty damn foolish. However, I will concede that this is perhaps a subjective point of view and give those who voted for Bush in 2000 a pass.
However, if you voted for the Shrub in 2004, well, you have no excuse. You knew what you were getting and either you liked it and wanted more or you simply insisted on believing that a plummeting economy, rampant political corruption and cronyism, over a thousand dead American troops, and an administration that never met a lie it didn’t willingly embrace and that was willing to out its own covert agents in a petty, foolish attempt to cover its own ass, was somehow not Dubya’s fault.
Either way, you’re a goddam fool, and while I would never in my life try to say you shouldn’t be allowed to say anything you want, or do anything you want that doesn’t cause any harm to me or others, casting a vote is hardly a socially neutral or consequence free act. You want to watch NASCAR and various spin offs of SURVIVOR 24/7, you want to eat exclusively at Pepsico franchises, you want to go to church every Sunday and let your kids play Grand Theft Auto as long as they can’t see any naked cartoon bosoms while they do it, that’s fine… you’re a dipshit and I don’t want to hang out with you, but you certainly have an inalienable right to be as foolish as you want. That’s what America is all about.But when your foolish behavior starts screwing up everyone else on the planet, well, I draw a line.
So I say, which is most important – the right of citizens to vote, or preventing those who are ineligible to vote from doing so? Well, it depends on why you are making certain people ineligible to vote. Personally, I think that if someone is an ex convict who has enough wisdom to vote for anyone but the Shrub in 2004, well, that person should be allowed to vote.
No votes for fools. We just can’t afford it any more.
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