I must have overlooked a critical element in this week’s photo-identification-for-voters argument before the United States Supreme Court.
The case involves Indiana’s mandatory photo ID law, which is regarded as the toughest in the nation.
Indiana Democrats filed suit three years ago, claiming the new state law was unconstitutional because — all right, boys and girls, please turn to the chorus in your hymnals — it was unfair to and would disenfranchise thousands of “minorities, poor and elderly voters.”
How Can You Tell?
Where have I heard that before? The claim is equal parts astounding, silly and utterly indefensible. This town, and every other I have been in, is rife with elderly and minority voters. They are readily identifiable. How do you spot a driver who is “poor”? By his shoes? His car? Or his party registration? I was the poorest resident in Venice in the 1990s. But it was not evident at a glance.
I hear the catcalls below our bedroom window almost every weeknight in a clear Democratic voice: “Here victims, here victims,” followed by a shrill whistle.
Lawyers for the Indy Dems told the highly skeptical Supreme Court that “minorities, poor and the elderly” are not likely to have drivers licenses.
Let’s See If We Can Lose Again
This kind of creative reasoning helps to explain why, as I have mentioned before, the Democrat Party has lost two out of every three Presidential elections since Lincoln.
Have you ever known of anyone in Culver City or on the Westside — who is legal — who does not possess a photo identification of himself?
Indiana petitioners brought the case before it became law in the state. Therefore it could not produce any voters any (heaven, forgive me) “victims” who would say they had been intimidated by the law. Chief Justice John Roberts said the court was not in to trying hypothetical cases.
The eventual ruling is expected to go against the protesting Democrats.
Ah, Yes, a Sneaky Agenda
It seems to me that the only valid reason Dems could have for bringing the case is to increase the party’s voter rolls on the theory that most voters are drive-by readers. Few people, conservative or liberal, have the time or inclination to scour newspapers, journals, online sources the way we few junkies do.
Therefore, when the casual reader encounters the “likely deprivation or intimidation of minorities, the poor and the elderly,” his antennae sprout.
The first reaction is sympathy. The second is support. The third reaction is to sign up with the petitioning party because obviously it has a heart for the underdog.
Dems Defy Logic
Since Democrats have accused President Bush’s allies of stealing the last two elections, logic would make you think they favor narrowing the possibilities for voter fraud.
But Democrats have another agenda that interferes with their main vision. They have conducted an unrelieved search for victims since the 1960s, the period when emotion began to transcend reason as the spine of the party.
Times Spites in the Eye of Logic
The New York Times, whose prestige this decade under Publisher Punchy Sulzberger Editor Bill Kellar has begun plummeting rather than slipping, was at the forefront of the fraud charges against Mr. Bush in ’00 and ’08.
Yet, the Times amazingly flipflopped in an editorial (“The Voter and Voter ID’s”) on yesterday’s Op-Ed page.
Displaying a severe case of amnesia and absence of sound reasoning, the Times said, “In-person voter fraud is extremely rare.”
This is the opposite of the newspaper’s long held, loudly proclaimed position.
The main impact of the Indiana law, the Times claimed, “will be to disenfranchise large numbers of registered voters.”
Introducing a New Third Worlder
The Times, which never plays a race card unless it really, really has to, cited an unidentified, unsubstantiated “study” in Georgia. This suspicious research “found that black voters were more than 83 percent more likely than whites not to have driver’s licenses or state issued IDs. Hispanics were nearly twice as likely not to have them.”
Sounds to me as if the Times is accusing Georgia of operating as a Third World country by not requiring non-whites to have driver’s licenses. There is a scandal worth looking into rather than messing around with this phony lemonade-stand of a case.
The evidence is so straight-forward. Common sense tells even disconnected readers that minorities are as likely as majorities to have driver’s licenses.
Poor are as likely as the wealthy and middle-class voters to have driver’s licenses.
KPFK for Dessert
Driving to the Democratic Club meeting last night after dinner in Pico-Robertson, I tuned in to radio’s answer to Comedy Central, KPFK (90.7 FM), where you must have a surgically altered accent or a racial impediment to qualify for employment. The station thinks that Kucinich is a centrist.
KPFK’s 7 o’clock hour routinely is devoted to victims.
Let’s All Be Poor Together
Democrats, as you know, are obsessed with “equality” rather than morality or merit. They always are ripe for a laugh, and I enjoyed one. A woman in San Francisco was being interviewed on another of those nondescript “all of God’s children (except Republicans) are victims” programs.
The lady remarked that a “disproportionate” number of women in the Bay Area were impoverished. Disproportionate?
Is there a law saying there must be a dead equal number poor men and poor gals?
Smart Democrats, help me understand.
