Shaving The Odds

by digby

Via TPM, I see that a prominent Republican accidentally told the truth:

Baselice conducted a poll the first week in April for an anonymous client on another subject. He says he threw the voter ID question in on his own, because it was a hot topic at the time. He provided the results to Republicans, who are now using it to support their cause.

The poll found 95 percent of Republicans, 91 percent of independents and 87 percent of Democrats support using photo IDs.

Royal Masset, the former political director of the Republican Party of Texas, who trained Baselice, says it is easy to elicit that kind of response to a poll question.

Among Republicans it is an “article of religious faith that voter fraud is causing us to lose elections,” Masset said. He doesn’t agree with that, but does believe that requiring photo IDs could cause enough of a dropoff in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3 percent to the Republican vote.

After one of my rants about the 2000 “election” I remember an acquaintance telling me to get over it because Americans believe winning is everything and nobody cares how they do it. Judging from the raucous applause we heard at the Republican debate when the candidates tried to top each other with greater and greater declarations that they have no moral or ethical limits, I think that’s basically right. The cult of braindead Hollywood macho has become so warped that a good many people in this country believe playing by rules is for losers.

This is the dazzle-them-with-bullshit Enron philosophy taken to its logical end. The politicization of the justice department and trying to suppress the Democratic vote with onerous requirements was just smart politics. This Texas Republican quoted above committed the only possible error a modern Republican politician can commit. As we can see by the behavior of Bush, Cheney, Libby, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and every last administration war supporter, the only thing dumber than playing by the rules is admitting that you didn’t.

And anyway:

“The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States” (Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98, 104 [2000]).

So there you go.

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