It's The Voter Suppression, Stupid

As the various postmortems of the 2017 election continue to dribble in, there seems to be a somewhat consistent theme in many of them:

Hillary Clinton ran a terribly flawed campaign. She didn't do enough of this or she did too much of that or....Therefore it's her fault she lost.

Let's set aside the fact that she got almost 3 million more votes than our so-called President. (We all know that the only "real" Americans live in the heartland. Big city votes just don't count as much because those aren't real Americans.)

Though there were some faults with the Clinton campaign, the major problems she faced were as follows:

1) It is hard to run against a pathological liar, especially when the media seems to think his pathology is "amusing" and good for ratings.

2) This same media is devoted to the "both sides do it" meme, which allows any minor Democratic misstep to outweigh 1000 Republican lies.

3) James Comey's unprecedented behavior in the last days of the campaign.

4) President Obama's reluctance to loudly and repeatedly announce the Russians' ongoing interference.

5) The above mentioned Russian interference, the size of which we're still trying to figure out.

All of these things might have been surmounted, by the way.

But then there was one other thing, something completely un-American, that couldn't:

6) Voter suppression.

The one thing Republicans are really good at, perhaps the only thing* they're good at besides fund raising and scaring simpletons, is voter suppression. Every state controlled by Republicans has systematically made it harder for voters who lean Democratic to vote.

EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.

They can't govern worth a damn, but boy can they stop minorities from voting!

*I forgot LYING. That's really what Republicans are best at.

LYING.

Everything is All Better Now, or: The South Has Risen

Thank God for the Supreme Court! Without them, and their omniscient wisdom, we'd all still think that racism was a problem here in the good old U S of A.

But no, it's most definitely not. We're past that. We're better than that. That was, after all, a long time ago. Now we're a post racial society.

Chief Justice John Roberts knows this. Just like he knew Citizens United was the right call. He's a very smart man.

Those of us who aren't as smart might think that the factors that made the Voting Rights Act necessary in the first place are still present and active in a large part of the United States.

We might think that the laws enacted by far wiser and better men than those who struck them down are still needed.

We might consider it a classic case of circular reasoning to say that the laws that made some progress possible are no longer needed because they made some progress possible. A simple person might argue that there would have been no progress at all without the laws and that to weaken them will unchain powerful, regressive forces.

For proof we would simply offer the fact that the election of President Obama unleashed a torrent of race based hatred. Hatred that is stoked on a daily basis by Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News creeps.

And that the day--the same day--the decision to strike down part of the law was announced--Texas moved ahead with a restrictive voter ID law that would not have been possible were the law intact.

But that's why we're not on the Supreme Court. We simply don't recognize all of the progress we've made.

We do not live in the same world as John Roberts.

PS If I woke up tomorrow to find Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito hanging from a tree with carrion birds pecking at their livers I would not shed a single tear. Except, perhaps, for the poor birds, which might die from ingesting something so vile.