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| credit: D. Whamond; Wackydoodle axes: Do you want fries with that? |
After what the Party of Sedition wrought in Georgia last night, they should no longer be considered a liberal democratic institution. They have become a death cult organized around one leading principle--maintaining electoral viability through voter suppression and anti-democratic procedural rules. The Georgia legislation allows a POS dominated legislature to overrule local boards of election and select their members, thus insuring the candidates they want will win. In a repeat of Reconstruction-era oppression, Georgia troopers even arrested a black Democratic lawmaker wishing to witness the governor signing the repressive legislation that was passed with lightening speed in less than one day. Here is what a German said when asked by an American writer how the Nazis rose to power in a otherwise liberal democracy:
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security....To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop."
The same process is happening in Georgia and potentially in other states like Wisconsin and Iowa where the POS works feverishly to restrict access to the ballot box in ways that disproportionately affect minorities and youth, constituencies that tend to vote Democratic.
Their totalitarian strategy of milking the BIG LIE of a stolen election to change election laws in their favor is effective. Georgia governor Brian Kemp won office against a black woman by just about 55,000 votes after he had ordered a purge of the Georgia rolls as secretary of state removing thousands of black voters, and then refused to register 53,000 new voters gathered by his opponent Stacey Abrams. Abrams was 17,000 votes short of forcing a run off. As governor he has signed into law the largest contraction in voting rights in the state since the sixties.
Sinclair Lewis warned us. It is happening here because we have neglected tending the garden of democracy. The Senate must pass the federal election standards if democracy is to withstand the creeping fascist onslaught. That requires crypto-reactionaries like Joe Manchin to get on the correct side of history.
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| Oh, Jimmy, where are you now when we need you! |