How ironic that the Supreme Court, dominated by rightwing ideologues, nightriders and barnburners, is dedicating time to airily wondering whether America’s protections of the right to vote aren’t outdated exactly when America’s protections of the right to vote are under more attack than in a generation.
There is not less to fear but more.
The enemy of America’s rights this time is the Republican party — which in state after state is imposing harsh and terrible attacks on Americans’ chance to vote in fair and effective manner. People are denied the ballot for trifles, made to wait in hours’ long lines, abused and treated like criminals by the Republican party.
No distant enemy of the nation has ever caused as many Americans to be discombobulated, harrassed and harried at the polls as has the Republican party with its proud voter suppression campaign. Osama bin laden did less damage to our liberties at the polls than has the Republican party. Bin laden suppressed not a single American ballot — except those of the Ameericans who lost their lives at his bloody hands. Yet the Republicans in state after state have caused thousands and thousands of American citizens to be denied their rights, to be penalized for no crime whatever except their race, national origin or political affiliation.
No doubt the Supreme Court hacks will allow ever new ways for the GOP anti-patriots to inflict their partisan damage on the liberties so many have fought for.
That’s what we’ve come to expect from them.
It’s what they do.
90 to 30?
Howabout 30 to 90?
I know the UConn Women’s basketball program is sainted and beyond anything but the most reverential adoration. But come on.
90 to 30?
105 to 28?
119 to 50?
102 to 45?
105 to 49?
101 to 41?
94 to 37?
97 to 25?
Is that sports? The fawning goes on how well they play and how god-like is the coach. But is that what we want from our squeeky clean sports? Massacres? Scores run up crazily high?
This is getting a little stale.
Okie doke. They have to cut the budget. Since it is so often said by government haters hat there are so many people sponging on the federal budget, clusters of special interests gorging at the public trough, here’s a start; what government hater would ever object to cut:
Fort Jackson in South Carolina
Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina
Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina
The McEntire Joint National Guard Base in South Carolina
Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort in South Carolina
The Naval Weapons Station Charleston in South Carolina
Brooks City-Base in Texas
Dyess Air Force Base in Texas
The Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas
Lackland Air Force Base in Texas
Randolph Air Force Base in Texas
Fort Bliss in Texas
Fort Hood in Texas
Fort Sam Houston in Texas
Red River Army Depot in Texas
The Naval Air Station in Texas
NAS Corpus Christi in Texas
Naval Air Station Kingsville in Texas
Eglin Air Force Base in Florida
Hurlbert Field Air Force Base in Florida
MacDill Air Force Base in Florida
Patrick Air Force Base in Florida
Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida
Camp Blanding in Florida
Air Station Clearwater in Florida
Blount Island Command in Florida
NAS Jacksonville in Florida
Naval Air Station Key West in Florida
The Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida
Naval Air Station Whiting Field in Florida
Naval Station Mayport in Florida
Naval Support Activity Panama City in Florida
Moody Air Force Base in Georgia
Robins Air Force Base in Georgia
Camp Frank D. Merrill in Georgia
Fort Benning in Georgia
Fort Gillem in Georgia
Fort Gordon in Georgia
Fort McPherson in Georgia
Fort Stewart in Georgia
Hunted Army Airfield in Georgia
Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany in Georgia
Kings Bay Submarine Base in Georgia
NAS Atlanta in Georgia
Done with that there’s so many more to cut in Alabama, Mississippi, Wisconsin, etc.
Oughtn’t the Iraqis have invaded America?
If pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is the passport to walking into someone else’s country and wrecking the place, who could say the Iraqis or Afghans don’t have the same call on coming here that we claimed in going there?
What country has more weapons of mass destructions just lying around than gun-crazy-America?
Imagine, too, that there was an outfit somewhere whose principal mission was to promote weapons amd policies and a lifestyle that have killed far more Americans than did Osama bin Laden? Or the Viet Cong? Or the North Koreans? Or Adolph Hitler? Or the secessionist slave states? Or imperial Britain asmashing its uppity colonists? Would we stand for that?
Of course not. We rattle around the earth blowing up peoples by the thousands or the ones and twos because they don’t like or us or talk big about harming some of us. While we kill ourselves by the tens of thousands. With guns.
But the gun madness and its manufacturers and promoters in the NRA and the Republican party national platform think we don’t have enough guns and no matter the bloodshed their lunatic policies have spilled. American blood. None of our enemies have killed as many of us as has our gun culture — and those who promote it, ankle-deep in the gore of American children, American grief.
Who is our greater enemy then?
Who deserves our strongest assaults then?
Who has harmed us most and who needs to be controlled entirely?
Al Qaeda? Or guns?
Count the corpses and come up with the anwser
What do they imagine, these people who put their love of guns above even their own children and higher than life itself? What will they say when called to the fiery judgment for their awful actions: “I have this bit of paper that puts me beyond Your wrath for all the death and soul-scalding pain. I have this man-made slip of protection that over-awes Your love of your precious creation, the peace Your message sings. No matter how high the corpses might mount, no matter how deep is the tide of the blood of all God’s children, I have the right to have done this.”
Can anyone believe that the eternal hellfires, the spiders and serpents and isolation from the face of God forever, can be deflected by some scrap of law or legislation, some bit of misery-wracked cavil crafted by the Founding Fools who were so right on the commerce clause and footnotes to taxation but so horribly, catastrophically wrong on slavery, the equality of all and the unending wash of sorrow from guns?
Can any amendment, any gun club card, persuade the Creator that the ghastly destruction of his children, the agony of those who love them so, is right because in one miserable place it is merely legal? Those who work so powerfully for this pain will someday stare deep into the eyes of Justice. Do they believe that they can shield themselves from the hereafter they have earned behind some ancient bit of foolish man’s law?
This love of the gun more than the love of our neighbors may go unrewarded here where the men with the guns and the money intimidate all, but there is a greater weighing ahead. It is what we have been told.
And if there isn’t, then to hell with hell.
