What????

I just ran across this article:

Voter ID law an ugly effort to subvert ballot

It's not the first such article I've seen, but I'd thought these people had been laughed out of the public forum -- that it was no longer possible for someone to espouse this opinion with a straight face.

Apparently I was wrong.

Cynthia Tucker apparently believes that it is too much to ask people to obtain an acceptable photo id and the apparently tremendous effort it would take to get one will keep some people from voting.

So with a straight face she and others make the argument that any effort to thwart voter fraud is actually an effort to "subvert" the voting process. What else are we to make of such statements? That is exactly what they are saying.

Cynthia also appears to be under the impression that it's ok for 6 people to trap an innocent person and, based upon his race, beat the crap out of him because those six people happen to be black and they saw two nooses hanging from a tree a few months before. It's an injustice to prosecute them for assault and battery if it's black on white crime and the perpetrators have something to be mad about. Which, according to the race-baiting crowd, means any black, any time.

It's not so much that people like Cynthia hold such outlandish positions. It's that so many people are unwilling to challenge them on it. This is one of the reasons I started this blog -- because basically I'm too polite in public to challenge people on stuff like this, and by God I need an outlet. Such people have a grotesquely twisted notion of justice and injustice.

One "point" that really stuck out in her piece was that Republicans are really reaching, nay, fantasising that voter fraud actually exists even though, and I'll quote her here:

there has never -- never -- been a single documented case of "voter impersonation" at the ballot box, with a fake voter using an electric bill or phone bill to pretend to be a valid voter.

and then she laughs off the point that such a case would be impossible to document without, you know, documentation with this argument:

OK, then. Got that? It's a little like the search for life on other planets. Extra-terrestrials are out there, even if none has actually been spotted.

Nnnnot exactly. That's more like insisting that there isn't any voter fraud via voter impersonation because none has actually been spotted. Therefore we should resist efforts to make it hard to do without getting spotted????

It's pretty hard to say that there aren't extra terrestrials "out there" because, frankly, there's waaaay to much "out there" that is thus far impossible for us to observe. It doesn't mean there aren't any. That's just a fact.

Further, we know that voter fraud exists, and has existed since the beginning of voting. We know people, we know their strong motivations, and we know this huge loophole that would be relatively easy to exploit. We can't say the same for extra terrestrials. I'd say her example, if used properly, actually works against her argument.

I'm not going to come out and accuse progressives of exploiting the loophole, but I'd suggest that the howls of protest might -- just might -- be out of fear on the part of people who have been taking advantage of it. Playing the race card might just be a sign of desperation, who knows? The unassailable "victim" argument, that'll shut 'em up!

It is true that some people don't have photo id. But when your state passes a law saying you have to have one to vote, then my suggestion would be to go get one if you plan on voting. There's a way to get one if it's important to you. I am quite certain it doesn't have to be a drivers license, so poor little old ladies with epilepsy like Mary-Jo Criswell can still get one even if they can't drive.

Cynthia goes on to say that citizens like Criswell have every right to vote, "just like it says in the Bill of Rights". Ok, but how do we know she's a citizen? You're saying that's too much to ask. Not to mention that nowhere in the Bill of Rights is anything written about any individual citizen's right to vote. Careful, there, Cynthia, your ignorance is showing.