[Vision2020] The word "ringers"

Thu Oct 28 14:21:57 PDT 2004

Sigh.  To quote Lily Tomlin, it looks like things are going to get a lot 
worse before they get worse.                                                 

Carl Westberg Jr.

>From: "Joan Opyr" <auntiestablishment at hotmail.com>
>To: "Vision2020 Moscow" <vision2020 at moscow.com>
>Subject: [Vision2020] The word "ringers"
>Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 13:20:00 -0700
>
>Dear Visionaries:
>
>Time for a little plain speaking, as Rose would say.  I have been 
>profoundly disturbed by the GOP's well-publicized election day plans to 
>challenge newly registered voters in largely minority precincts.  The GOP 
>claims to be concerned about potential fraud; I'm concerned that the 
>Republican Party is now spelling fraud "J-i-m C-r-o-w."
>
>For your outrage/edification, I'm forwarding an excellent piece by Harold 
>Meyerson published yesterday in The Washington Post.  Below that is my 
>letter in response to Mr. Meyerson.  It's long past time to start calling 
>this shovel a spade.  What the GOP is up to is a disgrace; let's name and 
>shame.
>
>Yours sincerely,
>Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment
>
>
> >From
>
>washingtonpost.com
>The GOP's Shameful Vote Strategy
>
>By Harold Meyerson
>
>Wednesday, October 27, 2004; Page A25
>With Election Day almost upon us, it's not clear whether President Bush is 
>running a campaign or plotting a coup d'etat. By all accounts, Republicans 
>are spending these last precious days devoting nearly as much energy to 
>suppressing the Democratic vote as they are to mobilizing their own.
>Time was when Republicans were at least embarrassed by their efforts to 
>keep African Americans from the polls. Republican consultant Ed Rollins was 
>all but drummed out of the profession after his efforts to pay black 
>ministers to keep their congregants from voting in a 1993 New Jersey 
>election came to light.
>For George W. Bush, Karl Rove and their legion of genteel thugs, however, 
>universal suffrage is just one more musty liberal ideal that threatens 
>conservative rule. Today's Republicans have elevated vote suppression from 
>a dirty secret to a public norm.
>In Ohio, Republicans have recruited 3,600 poll monitors and assigned them 
>disproportionately to such heavily black areas as inner-city Cleveland, 
>where Democratic "527" groups have registered many tens of thousands of new 
>voters. "The organized left's efforts to, quote unquote, register voters -- 
>I call them ringers -- have created these problems" of potential massive 
>vote fraud, Cuyahoga County Republican Chairman James P. Trakas recently 
>told the New York Times.
>Let's pass over the implication that a registration drive waged by a 
>liberal group is inherently fraud-ridden, and look instead at that word 
>"ringers."
>Registration in Ohio is nonpartisan, but independent analysts estimate that 
>roughly 400,000 new Democrats have been added to the rolls this year. Who 
>does Trakas think they are? Have tens of thousands of African Americans 
>been sneaking over the state lines from Pittsburgh and Detroit to vote in 
>Cleveland -- thus putting their own battleground states more at risk of a 
>Republican victory? Is Shaker Heights suddenly filled with Parisians 
>affecting American argot? Or are the Republicans simply terrified that a 
>record number of minority voters will go to the polls next Tuesday? Have 
>they decided to do anything to stop them -- up to and including threatening 
>to criminalize Voting While Black in a Battleground State?
>This is civic life in the age of George W. Bush, in which politics has 
>become a continuation of civil war by other means. In Bush's America, 
>there's a war on -- against a foreign enemy so evil that we can ignore the 
>Geneva Conventions, against domestic liberals so insidious that we can 
>ignore democratic norms. Only bleeding hearts with a pre-Sept. 11 mind-set 
>still believe in voting rights.
>For Bush and Rove, the domestic war predates the war on terrorism. From the 
>first day of his presidency, Bush opted to govern from the right, to fan 
>the flames of cultural resentment, to divide the American house against 
>itself in the hope that cultural conservatism would create a stable 
>Republican majority. The Sept. 11 attacks unified us, but Bush exploited 
>those attacks to relentlessly partisan ends. As his foreign and domestic 
>policies abjectly failed, Bush's reliance on identity politics only grew 
>stronger. He anointed himself the standard-bearer for provincials and 
>portrayed Kerry and his backers as arrogant cosmopolitans.
>And so here we are, improbably enmeshed in a latter-day version of the 
>election of 1928, when the Catholicism of Democratic presidential nominee 
>Al Smith bitterly divided the nation along Protestant-Catholic and 
>nativist-immigrant lines. To his credit, Smith's opponent (and eventual 
>victor), Herbert Hoover, did not exploit this rift himself. Bush, by 
>contrast, has not merely exploited the modernist-traditionalist tensions in 
>America but helped create new ones and summoned old ones we could be 
>forgiven for thinking were permanently interred. (Kerry will ban the 
>Bible?)
>Indeed, it's hard to think of another president more deliberately divisive 
>than the current one. I can come up with only one other president who 
>sought so assiduously to undermine the basic arrangements of American 
>policy (as Bush has undermined the New Deal at home and the systems of 
>post-World War II alliances abroad) with so little concern for the effect 
>this would have on the comity and viability of the nation. And Jefferson 
>Davis wasn't really a president of the United States.
>After four years in the White House, George W. Bush's most significant 
>contribution to American life is this pervasive bitterness, this division 
>of the house into raging, feuding halves. We are two nations now, each with 
>a culture that attacks the other. And politics, as the Republicans are 
>openly playing it, need no longer concern itself with the most fundamental 
>democratic norm: the universal right to vote.
>As the campaign ends, Bush is playing to the right and Kerry to the center.
>That foretells the course of the administrations that each would head. The 
>essential difference between them is simply that, as a matter of strategy 
>and temperament, Bush seeks to exploit our rifts and Kerry to narrow them. 
>That, finally, is the choice before us next Tuesday: between one candidate 
>who wants to pry this nation apart to his own advantage, and another who 
>seeks to make it whole.
>meyersonh at washpost.com
>From: Joan Opyr
>Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 10:23 AM
>To: meyersonh at washpost.com
>Cc: auntiestablishment at hotmail.com
>Subject: The word "ringers"
>
>Dear Mr. Meyerson,
>
>I grew up in the South, so when it comes to racism, perhaps my ears are a 
>little sensitive, but when I read that Cuyahoga County Republican Chairman 
>James P. Trakas calls the voters who have been registered by the organized 
>left "ringers," I hear an echo of the word "niggers," and I don't think 
>this is coincidental.  At best, it's a kind of aural Freudian slip.  The 
>GOP's disgraceful effort to suppress new voters is concentrated almost 
>solely in districts with large minority populations; clearly, this is a 
>throw-back to the bad old days of Jim Crow laws and poll tests.  It's a sin 
>and a shame that the party of Lincoln should now rely on bigotry and racism 
>to appeal to white voters and disenfranchisement to suppress black turnout. 
>  This is the bitter fruit of Richard Nixon's so-called Southern Strategy: 
>divide and conquer.
>
>Thank you for your opinion piece exposing this blatant abuse.  Let us hope 
>that the GOP effort backfires and that we have a free and fair vote on 
>November 2nd in which record numbers of minority votes are not only cast 
>but counted.
>
>Sincerely,
>
>Joan Opyr
>Moscow, Idaho
>www.auntie-establishment.comGet more from the Web.  FREE MSN Explorer 
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