repub123

The Republicans are playing the “race card” now because that is all they have left. Right-wing talk radio, Fox News, Kenneth Blackwell, and the McCain-Palin campaign have all been accusing the activist group, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), of “voter fraud” and even playing a role in the subprime mortgage crisis. They have lumped Obama in with ACORN even though he never worked for the organization, and because ACORN is heavily identified with African-American urban communities the Rightwing is trying to tarnish ACORN’s current voter registration activities as being somehow “unfair” to white Republicans and use that charge to smear Obama. The allegations have been proven false but they remind me of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, glorifying the history of the Ku Klux Klan. In the film there are scenes of black “freedmen” in the Reconstruction South stuffing ballot boxes to rig elections against the white majority. The KKK bursts on the scene to render “justice” for the white victims of what today Rush Limbaugh would call “voter fraud.” It is noteworthy how little the tropes of racism have changed in America in the past hundred years. The near total collapse of the financial system and the subsequent panic selling on Wall Street have repudiated everything for which the Republican Party stood for the last 30 years: Neo-cons wishing to use American military power to assert dominance and spread “democracy?” Forget it — We don’t have the money to do that anymore. War hawks who want U.S. troops to stay in Iraq until “victory” is attained? Forget about it — We don’t have $4 billion a month to throw at Iraq. Tax cutters and deregulators who promise that if we just strip away government our “ownership society” will efficiently distribute the bounty because that’s what markets do — Are you telling us a bad joke!? The economic crisis upended the McCain campaign. In desperation, McCain has chosen to go negative 100 percent of the time. He sent forth his evangelical VPILF to hurl McCarthyite smears and race-baiting attacks at the African-American candidate. And she has done so in a way that only a person from a lily-white noncontiguous state could do. But McCain’s is a failed “strategy.” The Bush Administration’s reckless disregard for governance has finally precipitated the humungous crisis many of us believed was lurking beneath the surface for many years now. He ran the United States in a manner akin to that of a tin-pot dictator in a banana republic. We are fortunate that the timing of the great financial collapse allows us to hold a referendum on the miserable years of misrule under George Walker Bush. “No” or “Si.” Let the voting begin!