Saturday, April 16, 2011

A nice man gave me free firewood

Yesterday - as I was keeping an eye on the Tea Party losers - I damn near choked on some big league right-wing chew!

I'd just arrived across the street from the teagaggers when I was confronted by one of the rally's 20 or so useless participants. Turned out he was Bill Johnson, a Republican candidate for Kentucky Secretary of State (an office that recently flipped from Republican to Democratic by will of the people).

And he must be the most ridiculous politician in the world. He actually asked for my vote - when everybody ought to know by now there's not a chance in hell I'll vote for him.

If Johnson had stayed around me any longer than 30 seconds or so, he would have had heard quite an earful. I was about ready to tell him that his whole party stinks.

Meanwhile, he gave me one of his slick campaign pamphlets, which does nothing but underscore his extremism. As Johnson brags in his campaign literature about being a "Reagan Republican", he also touts his support for requiring voters to display a photo ID when they vote. This makes Johnson look like a fool on several fronts. For starts, I've been voting for 20 years, and I've been carded every time, so it's not like he's advocating anything new. For another, he's fighting a fabricated crisis just to win votes.

It's a dog whistle to energize the fascist base. In the past few years, the media has generated much noise about alleged voter fraud that they claim hurts the Republicans - while real election fraud that benefits the GOP is ignored. Anybody who believes this appeal is an idiot, a meth-head, and a racist. It's kind of like when the elder Bush attacked Michael Dukakis for his ACLU support. That attack appealed to people who didn't even have the capacity to vote responsibly.

Long story short: Bill Johnson is a demagogue who lacks ideas.

His campaign pamphlet will make a nice addition to my firewood stash, compost heap, or toilet paper stockpile.

14 comments:

  1. Scott Walker was elected via "the will of the people". Or was that cheating too?

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  2. Also, the current Kentucky secretary of state was appointed, not elected.

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  3. The previous Secretary of State resigned to take a different job, genius.

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  4. And where does the "will of the people" come in.

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  5. If the public didn't want a Democrat, the governor wouldn't have appointed one.

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  6. That's idiocy. The public generally doesn't pay attention to a relatively obscure office like that. Plus, Democrats do unpopular stuff all the time. Tell me, if there had been an election, who would have won? The Republican or Democrat?

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  7. Even though that Rand Paul won duing the 2010 elections, and the Republicans swept Kentucky?

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  8. Um, no. They didn't. The Democrats won 2 of Kentucky's House seats (one of them by double digits), and both of those are in areas that gained population in the new census.

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  9. They won two. Republicans won four. I can see that you are incapable of math.

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  10. Hate to tell you this, but most of the Republican counties lost people in the census.

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