Goo Goo G’joob

by digby

Crooks and Liars has a very informative video up of Paul Weyrich laying out the case for vote suppression back in the 1980’s. He pretty much admits that the Republicans only gain a majority by keeping Democrats from voting:

Weyrich: “Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome — good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

The funny thing about this is that it was traditionally the evangelical Christians who eschewed “wordly” involvement in politics for sincere philosophical and theological reasons. And Paul Weyrich has made a very lucrative career out of threatening that they will once again retreat from the public square if the Republicans don’t stop being so liberal and failing the cause.

This guy is among the biggest con artists on the planet and it’s important to keep this in mind every time he fundraises and markets a new book to the gullible base about how the Republicans failed them but they need to keep the flame. It’s hard to believe they don’t see through his scam by now, but there’s a right wing sucker born every minute.

On the larger issue of vote suppression, it’s been amply documented that the effort that Karl Rove is alleged to have spearheaded to use the DOJ to push phony cases of voter fraud is part of a program that began back in the 1980’s. What we are seeing unravel in the US Attorney scandal is not a case of a rogue group within the department and white house or even a too-clever overreach run by Bush’s brain. This was part of an ongoing, many-decades-long GOP operation to convince the public that “voter fraud” is a threat to the nation’s electoral integrity so that they could keep Democrats from voting. It’s really that simple.

Now, this was accompanied by other measures, including a sophisticated program to challenge close elections and probably rig the voting machines wherever they could. But the most important part was the propaganda and the legal machanisms. They foolishly fired a bunch of Republican prosecutors and then publicly sullied their professional reputations or it would have gone on under the radar and probably tainted the 2008 election. (It still might…)

Weyrich says it clearly and you know it’s true. The more people who vote, the less likely it is that Republicans win. Now, that knowledge would make decent small d democrats take a look at their philosophy and wonder why that would be. They are not decent small d democrats and they don’t care what the people of this country actually want. They represent money and they use Jesus as a beard to stay in power.

If the congress does nothing more, they have to unravel this US Attorney scandal and Democrats need to start taking electoral reform seriously. They continue to ignore this program at their peril. It’s not going to disappear just because Rove is out of the white house.

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