I Think I Like Joe McNally . . .

Voting rights, right voting demand a return to basics
By Joel McNally
April 23, 2005

The attempt by Wisconsin Republicans to reduce voting by undesirables such as the elderly and the poor is laudable. But it doesn't go nearly far enough.

Frankly, Republicans aren't thinking conservative enough. It's time someone had the political courage to stand up and demand a return to voting as originally envisioned by our founding fathers.

Voting in Wisconsin should be limited to wealthy, white, male property owners.

Requiring a photo ID to exercise the rights of citizenship is a good first step to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of old people and poor folks who don't have driver's licenses or state ID cards.

But we won't be absolutely sure that all possibility of vote fraud has been eliminated until we eliminate all of those who cannot be trusted to vote correctly. . . .

President Bush calls it "the ownership society." It's only fair that the people who own everything should be the ones to call all the shots, including who should be elected to public office.

After all, wealthy, white males already pay the most for the candidates who run for public office. They should be assured of getting the elected officials they pay for.

The poor, on the other hand, rarely attend political fundraisers. If they did, they would be shown the door for glomming free food. There are givers, and there are takers. The poor are not givers.

The character flaws of the poor make them easy prey for vote fraud. A few years ago in Milwaukee, there was a flap about a Democratic supporter giving free cigarettes to homeless people to get them to vote.

It was reminiscent of the old-time, big-city machines that used to liquor up derelicts and send them in to vote. You could never buy the votes of wealthy, white males with a few cigarettes and shots of cheap booze. They already smoke the finest cigars and drink expensive scotch.

You can't buy Republican votes for anything less than billions of dollars in tax giveaways and elimination of major environmental regulations. . . .

In these times, you also can anticipate loud complaints from the "something-for-nothing" crowd about only allowing white people to vote. You can always count on some people to play the race card.

We cheapen voting when we allow just anyone to do it. Maybe, one day, when African Americans prove they are responsible enough to handle the vote without using it to elect a lot of shysters and flim-flammers, we can consider giving them full rights. Maybe we can start out by counting them as four-fifths of a man.

Until then, the people who have the greatest stake in our society - wealthy, white, male property owners - should not have their votes diluted by the votes of a lot of riff-raff.

Wisconsin needs to return to voting as it was originally intended to end the public embarrassment of going Democratic in presidential elections and electing Democrats to the governor's office and the U.S. Senate.

(Whole thing.)