Oooh, nuance!

"I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the 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."
--— Paul Weyrich, at a 1980 training session for 15,000 conservative preachers in Dallas.

I first heard that quote on the Thom Hartmann show, and after I picked my jaw up off the floor, my first coherent thought was "Of course!"

It has always seemed obvious to me that the Republics do not espouse American values. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say, "Screw you! I've got mine." Yet over and over again, that's what they say to everyone who is not as privileged as they. Tax cuts are only for the super-wealthy. Unions are bad for big business - never mind that they help better the lives of working people. War? It's when we say it is - it makes us and our friends rich. Science? Forget it - it interferes with our rape and pillage of the environment.

What some of us don't realize, is that the Republics know they don't represent the majority view; they've known it for decades, as the quote above illustrates. In our American "majority rule" system, that means that normally their party would not be able to hold a great deal of power. But this is an unacceptable outcome for the Republics - so, of course, they cheat.

Election fraud triumphed in 2000, 2002 and 2004, and it was narrowly avoided in 2006 due to a huge turnout and a large increase in voter awareness and election monitoring. (Remember when KKKarl said he had "the math" in 2006? We know what he meant, don't we?) Note: If you are still skeptical about election fraud, read Greg Palast, Bob Fitrakis and Brad Friedman.

And voila! Thanks to the "genius" of KKKarl Rove and his operatives in the Justice Department, the Bush Administration has taken election-stealing to a new level.

From Alternet.org:

State welfare offices across the country are not offering millions of low-income Americans the opportunity to register to vote when applying for public assistance despite a federal law requiring them to do so, according to an analysis of a recent federal voting registration report and experts who say the Department of Justice and states are to blame.

"It's huge. It's another area where the administration is failing us," said Donna Brazile, chair of the Democratic National Committee's Voting Rights Institute, speaking of the Department of Justice's oversight of the nation's voter registration laws. "They are not pushing states to recognize their voter registration responsibilities."

At the same time, the Justice Department's Voting Section, which enforces voting rights and supervises elections in some states, is pressuring 10 states to do more to purge voter rolls -- or remove ineligible voters -- before the 2008 presidential election, according to letters sent to state election officials this spring.

So they are 1) denying welfare recipients their opportunities to register to vote, and 2) pressuring states to purge their voter rolls of "felons" prior to 2008 (Why not? It worked so well in Ohio and Florida).

Is it any wonder the new Democratic Congress went after the Justice Department so quickly and persistently? Now, thanks to their investigations, we are finding more and more evidence that the Administration was using the traditionally non-partisan Justice Department for its illegal vote-suppression activities.

Luckily for the American majority, 11/7/06 changed everything.