The Daily Sandwich

"We have to learn the lesson that intellectual honesty is fundamental for everything we cherish." -Sir Karl Popper

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Location: Boston, Massachusetts, United States

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Thursday, October 09, 2008

The sound and the fury. And plenty of both

A week of good news for Obama seems to have the GOP doing the only thing they can-- fighting dirty, only harder. Only speak when the deck is stacked. Stoke racial fear. Lie your socks off. And all the while, do everything you can to keep people from voting.

The MSM has been showing signs of not playing along this time out. Seems like a good time to write letters to the editor to ensure that people are paying attention, getting angry, and trying not to let it happen again. After all, the wingers are doing all they can:

Groups looking to register new voters, and to get out the vote, took advantage of this window and killed two birds with one stone. One group in particular focused on a group of people who might not normally be expected to turn out. From the New York Post:

Volunteers supporting Barack Obama picked up hundreds of people at homeless shelters, soup kitchens and drug-rehab centers and drove them to a polling place yesterday on the last day that Ohioans could register and vote on the same day, almost no questions asked.

Some bloggers on the right, having read the Post’s article, are crying voter fraud. Obviously, there are some class issues in play here, and most bloggers who responded to the story focused on the homeless angle — not surprising, given the headline, “Homeless ‘Driven’ to Vote Obama.”

RedState’s Pejman Yousefzadeh, however, had a slightly different complaint — he noted that the Post’s report quotes a convicted felon who was driven to a polling place as part of the effort. In a post titled “Tell Me Again How Voter Fraud Doesn’t Exist …” Yousefzadeh wrote:

Because this story would beg to differ. Note that you are not supposed to be able to vote with a felony conviction.

Voter fraud regularly gets denied by our friends on the other side of the partisan divide. If they open their eyes, they will see that it is all around them … If there was any justice in the world, every media establishment would be flooding into Ohio asking just what kind of shoddy oversight was allowing convicted felons to register to vote.

(His emphasis.)

There’s just one problem with Yousefzadeh’s argument — the entire thing is based on a false assumption. In fact, if he had just paid closer attention to the Post article, he would have seen that felons who’ve served their time are now allowed to vote in Ohio.

UPDATE: Watch closely, because this is the face of insanity. "secret left-wing radical". . ."
wild-eyed radical". . . "Maoist". . . "What Obama is about is infiltrating (and training others to infiltrate) bourgeois institutions." All excellent examples of why progressive bloggers use the term reality-based community. The trick, you see, lies in being a functional adult even if you're not fighting battles that ended decades ago.