Tangled Webs and Weaves.. and Texas.

Eric Holder on voter ID laws: ‘We call those poll taxes’




Speaking before the NAACP, Attorney General Eric Holder departed from his prepared speech on Tuesday, decrying voter ID laws that have been proposed in 10 states so far. Talking Points Memo reports:

"Under the proposed law, concealed handgun licenses would be acceptable forms of photo ID, but student IDs would not," Holder said. "Many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them, and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them. We call those poll taxes."

Holder isn't the first to say such laws are racist. Benjamin Todd Jealous, CEO and president of the NCAAP, evoked the civil rights movement Monday, comparing the moment to "Selma and Montgomery times." Jealous unilaterally opposed the laws, saying, "Simply put, the NAACP will never stand by as any state tries to encode discrimination into law."
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/eric-holder-voter-id-laws-call-those-poll-193012336.html


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Twisted politics forces people into ridiculous positions.. on the surface.. requiring ID to prove you are who you say you are and that you do indeed have the right to vote seems like a no-brainer. Anyone designing a voting system would most certainly want to ensure the integrity of the election results. But what about if you wanted to ensure that those results could be manipulated? What kind of system would you design? Exactly: A system that does not require ID. And that system was.. to use an unexplainably black idiomatic expression.. "all fine and good" until the tables were turned.. and the ones that had traditionally derived the greatest benefit from that system are finding themselves holding the short end of the stick.. or so it seems. But if anything is certain on this Earth.. its that Texas's Electoral votes will be going to a Republican.. ID or no ID... so why the fuss?
What is really behind the wrongly-convicted/executed capital of the Western world's sudden obsession with integrity? The last election wasn't even close compared to the two previous elections featuring their own George Bush.. So why this now?

I'll give you a hint.. it has absolutely nothing to do with the integrity of poll results..
The fuss is part of an overall scheme to make the Obama administration look as unreasonable as possible. And to the uniformed voter.. . the first-time voter.. that is not able or willing to keep-up with the ever-changing context-sensitive partisan-political scorecard.. this whole idea of consider and ID requirement as a Poll Taxwill seem moderately unreasonable at best.. and completely ridiculous at worst. But the real question is will they see it as more unreasonable than the oppositions platform?
I say No.. but taken together with the President's ill-timed Biden-forced endorsement of Gay marriage, it may siphon-off a few percentage points of support to a pie-in-the-sky Independent candidate or to no one at all.

Now.. with all of that said..

The danger in this lay in any attempt by Obama supporters to argue this case on the merits of the surface issue.. requiring ID to vote. That is a trap issue. And you dont want to find yourself defending this solely on the merits of the surface context. The way to handle that is to cut across the surface issue and acknowledge the tactical political nature of this particular fight. But to do that.. you have to have a deeper understanding of the issues and whats really at stake... and the same goes for every other issue on the table. We have to evolve from the cheer-leading phase and begin to cultivate a deeper understanding of the Political landscape. Obama has, at most, 4 more years.. that's it, that's all.. and the whole black president thing is a wash if we don't use this time to march toward that deeper understanding. Everything he does can be undone.. he's temporary.. but the people will persist.. and the lessons learned from this whole experience must be folded into the fabric of our culture and remembered long after Obama walks out of the White House.. and later is better than sooner.. but either way, that day will come.


But is it Racism?

I don't think Racism is the right word in this situation.. really.. it's politics. The President is Black.. The First lady is Black.. The Attorney General is Black.. Even the Surgeon General is Black.. Black people are in Politically powerful positions.. you can't ignore that and skip over to claims of Racism.. This is Politics. And it's dirty and it's tiring.. but thats the game.. and if we're going to play it, we gotta stop pulling out that race card at every challenge. Of course the opposition want's Obama out.. just like we wanted Bush out.. and they wanted Clinton out.. that's the nature of the game. It's my opinion that we do ourselves, as a people, a disservice when we frame every challenge in terms of Racism. These are political to challenges in the perpetual struggle for power that we call "Democracy".. It's time to grow out of that impulse.. and update our rhetoric.

Like I said.. Obama has no more than 4 and half more years in office.. Then what?
If we don't use his time in office to grow politically, then we will be doing ourselves a tremendous disservice. We have to begin to frame these things outside of race.. that's a made hand and you can't win with it.. even when you do win, you lose. It's a framework that limits vision and growth.

If the Republicans lose this election, they will be forced to flush their ideology and re-tool the party platform.. or risk losing their corporate sponsorship.. and do you know where that corporate sponsorship will go then? To the Democratic party. Democrats will become the new representatives of corporate interests.. I personally think they already are.. I think both parties are two sides of the same coin.. but the money flows to where the power is.. and thats really what American politics is all about.. Money.