CT Blue

Well, I am far too nervous and stressed to do any serious thinking, so I’m going to do a little serious ranting.

This morning the Day ran an AP article about the dirty tricks that are as inevitable at this point in the election cycle as sunrise in the morning. (The Inevitable Onslaught Of Dirty Tricks Begins As Election Day Draws Closer ):

In the hours before Election Day, as inevitable as winter, comes an onslaught of dirty tricks – confusing e-mails, disturbing phone calls and insinuating fliers left on doorsteps during the night.

The intent, almost always, is to keep folks from voting or to confuse them, usually through intimidation or misinformation. But in this presidential race, in which a black man leads most polls, some of the deceit has a decidedly racist bent.

The article goes on to give a bill of particulars, citing numerous examples of dirty tricks. Not one, not a single one, was directed at Republicans by Democrats. Yet this rather salient fact is never explicitly mentioned. It is a fact that vote suppressing dirty tricks are a fact of life in this country, but it is only the Republicans who engage in them on a systematic basis, because it is only the Republicans who have anything to gain by them.

The article in its extended version (the web article is longer than that which appeared in the paper), tries to back up the false equivalency:

And Republicans are not exempt. “Part of it is that election campaigns are more online than ever before,” said Goldman. “During the primaries, a lot of Web sites went up that seemed to be for (GOP candidate Rudy) Giuliani, but actually were attack sites.”

New York City’s former mayor and his high-profile colleagues Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney were also targeted in fake Internet sites that featured “quotes” from the candidates espousing support for extreme positions they never endorsed.

Problem: neither of these are examples of voter suppression, neither took place in the final days of an election cycle, and neither was likely to have been perpetrated by Democrats since they had a primary campaign of their own on which to concentrate. They smack of internecine Republican on Republican attacks. They are not material to the subject matter of the article.

Is it asking too much for the AP to simply state the obvious fact: that at this time of year it’s Republicans that pull out the stops and engage in dirty tricks to try to keep people from voting. It is not inherent in the system; it’s simply a natural tendency for any party that can’t win on the merits and must do all that it can to hide its true positions and, especially when it can’t do that, try to prevent people from voting. This has been going on for decades. The Chief Justice who helped put Bush in the White House got his start suppressing the vote in Arizona. It’s a rite of passage for all good young Republican goons in training.

Rant finished. Tomorrow morning, dark and early, I’ll be heading off to the polls to do poll checking. (For the uninitiated, poll checking is not voter suppression. Each party checks off voters as they vote, so they can contact those who haven’t voted later in the day. I like to be a poll checker because it’s useful work but I don’t have to use the phone.) If all goes well I’ll be blogging from Groton HQ tomorrow night, though I must say anyone wasting their time reading this blog tomorrow night should seriously consider consulting a psychiatrist. It’s 7:30 right now, and if all goes well in about 24 hours we’ll hear good news from Virginia and we’ll know if truth, justice and the American way will finally triumph.