We’ll let our friend Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks handle this one…
“Deep irony”, indeed.
In addition to the bizarre questions from Louisiana’s literacy test for African-American voters in the 1960s that Cenk cites above, here are some of the ridiculously difficult questions from one of Alabama’s Jim Crow-era tests [PDF] that we cited back in 2010 when immigration foe and former Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo was similarly calling for literacy tests:
“If a president does not wish to sign a bill, how many days is he allowed in which to return it to Congress for consideration?”
“If the United States wishes to purchase land for an arsenal and have exclusive legislative authority over it, consent is required from [fill in the blank].”
Yes, it’s ironic that these idiots from Fox “News” and elsewhere on the right seem to know so little about American history that they’d call for literacy tests for voters without understanding that such tests were found to be illegal and unconstitutional as practiced in the Jim Crow South. Aside from being ironic, however, it’s also very lucky for brain-dead Fox viewers that literacy tests aren’t required for voting, given that study after study after study find them among the least informed Americans.
The effect of election changes nowadays in the United States is a clear return of Jim Crow era voter suppression. The suppression now goes beyond race and extends into such things as financial status and political affiliation. Everything displays deliberate intent of powerful interests to usurp and rig US democracy:
–the elimination of paper ballots with unverifiable electronic tabulation of elections
–gerrymandering
–US news media disregard of raw exit poll results, though it is mathematically nonsensical.
–The attacks against voter registration, such as the bizarre dismantling of ACORN on the basis of badly doctored videos, with the full participation of The New York Times with nary a hint of seriously trying to verify sources before widely reporting it as fact.
–The apparently deliberate cluelessness of the Democratic Party. Remember the footage of Obama voting with an electronic voting machine, as oblivious to acts of war within the nation against US democracy and actually participating in its destruction with a smile on his face. Being raped with smile on his face. Sorry, but what a fool. What a chump.
I honestly don’t understand why Americans are so submissive and complacent towards the serial raping of their democracy.
I think the whole world sees what is going on and only Americans are mysteriously blind to it. Why would any nation take US officials seriously respond to US officials’ lip-service to democracy? Is it denial? It is baffling to behold. It is as if the United States population had undergone mass hypnosis.
Adam @2,
“I honestly don’t understand why Americans are so submissive and complacent towards the serial raping of their democracy.”
Read the free book (PDF) “Authoritarians” and Dr. Lakoff’s work What Orwell Didn’t Know.
The problem is cultural/psychological, in terms of why the disintegration of election policy is now snowballing.