Republican Job Plan: Put Jim Crow To Work

       Shame on you.

       You no longer deserve to be a major political party in the United States.

       You no longer deserve to wear the mantle of moral legitimacy that comes with being “The Party of Abraham Lincoln.”

       I’ll say it again, just in case you’re as stone deaf to my words as you are to the values of democracy, fair play and decency.

       Shame on you.

       And shame on your totally transparent, thoroughly dishonorable and unforgivably crude attempt to steal the votes of millions of Americans, most of them poor, most of them black or hispanic, many of them students, but all of them more likely to vote for Democrats than for members of your amoral and illegitimate party.

       Yes, amoral and illegitimate!

       Illegitimate because after all your efforts to disenfranchise the poor and the marginalized there isn’t an outcome in your party’s favor that any sensible citizen would trust to be valid and untainted.

       Illegitimate because your party members repeatedly lie to defend these corrupt practices. They lie to the courts, to their constituents, to the voting public. Maybe even to themselves.

       Illegitimate because by dressing up voter suppression in the cloak of fraud prevention, you not only perpetrate a lie, you show equal disdain for both the democratic system and the people you pretend to serve.

       Illegitimate because you teamed up with a president, whose legitimacy will always be in doubt, to spend hundreds of billions of dollars bringing American-type democracy to Iraq.

       Is this how you see American democracy working? By purging eligible voters from the voter rolls? By requiring photo ID’s so that people unlikely to have driver’s licenses, like old people or the poor, will be turned away? By making it so difficult to register to vote that students or the elderly will eventually give up? Or by sending thugs out to intimidate voter registration drives?

       And how stupid you must be to think we’re so blind we can’t see what you’re doing? Or recognize the cynicism behind your protestations? Even if you spend all of the Koch brothers’ billions of dollars you can’t buy enough bleach to remove this indelible stain upon your party.

       There are banana republics where democracy gets a fairer shake than in some Republican controlled states.

       Shame on you.

       Shame on your being so weak that you rely on Jim Crow rather than your policies or politicians to win elections.

       You remember Jim Crow. He used to live in the Old South. He’s the guy that instituted a poll tax to keep black people from voting, the guy who used police clubs and fire hoses to keep blacks in their place, the guy who lynched blacks and forced them to ride in the back of buses and to drink from separate water fountains.

       And now he works for you.