Don’t Pull My Leg, and I Won’t Pull Yours

Democrats are not “coming to take your guns away.” Republicans are already here, taking your votes away. And which is more important — guns or votes? And should it even be necessary to ask that question?

If you say “guns,” well, doesn’t that support the idea of a military dictatorship?

And if you say “votes,” does that answer violate the Second Amendment?

Or is it just common sense?

Readers of this column know that for nearly 20 years I have described our country’s two dominantly squatting political parties in six words: “Republicans are liars; Democrats are cowards.”

Today, after decades in the desert: “Republicans are liars and cowards; some Democrats may finally be coming to see that it’s not necessary to be a coward.”

Republican states, governors and senators are ginning up the largest and most blatant attack on civil rights since the Solid South was controlled by racist Democrats in the years after World War II.

Georgia, again, is a leader in this repulsive trend, with its vomitous, and deceptively named Election Integrity Act of 2021, which makes it a crime for anyone except poll workers to offer water to people standing in line to vote.

Michigan, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona quickly jumped on that racist bandwagon. 

Arizona Republican state Rep. John Kavanagh said bluntly: “Everybody shouldn’t be voting.” Among those who should not vote, Kavanaugh said, are people who are “uninformed on the issues.” Sounds like a poll test to me. Remember those?

“Quantity [of votes] is important,” Kavanaugh said, “but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.”

The quality of votes? As though one voter’s ballot had a higher quality than another voter’s?

So how should we enforce that? Count a ballot from a nonwhite citizen as three-fifths of a vote? Which would still be better than the Constitution’s three-fifths compromise, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person, but did not allow them to vote.

Pennsylvania Republicans jumped into the filthy fray by introducing bills to gerrymander the elections of judges. 

Let’s be clear: 147 Republican members of Congress voted not to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, which Joe Biden won by 7 million votes. Their claims that the election was “stolen” focus upon returns from Black-majority districts — where Republicans tried to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes en masse — though no evidence emerged of voter fraud despite dozens of lawsuits nationwide.

Georgia’s newly elected Senator Raphael Warnock nailed it, in his first speech in the Senate: “We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era. This is Jim Crow in new clothes.

“Politicians in my home state and all across America, in their craven lust for power, have launched a full-fledged assault on voting rights. They are focused on winning at any cost, even the cost of the democracy itself. I submit that it is the job of each citizen to stand up for the voting rights of every citizen.”

Perzackly.

“Craven lust for power” pretty much sums up these pious-mouthed hypocrites whom Jesus Christ would have thrown out of their money-exchange house, the U.S. Congress, had He made it past the security guards. Party of Lincoln, my ass. 

Abraham Lincoln said: “I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just.”

And since we’re quoting people today, how about Shakespeare?

“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all …” except Republicans today, who have no conscience, and piss on claims of action — or invent them.

“And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.”

So, all you brave Republicans in Congress, and your supporters across the land, what actions do you propose today, except to oppose, oppose, oppose everything the elected leaders on the other side propose?

Name one thing — just one — that Republicans have proposed lately to improve the lives of our 330 million citizens.

And, no, suppressing the votes of 42 million Black people does not count.

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