Conservatives Are Furious That Liberals Are Trying to Register Ferguson Residents to Vote

[applegrove]

Conservatives Are Furious That Liberals Are Trying to Register Ferguson Residents to Vote
By Brian Beutler at the New Republic

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119141/ferguson-voter-registration-drive-infuriates-conservatives

"SNIP...............................




I’m not talking about responses to the details of Michael Brown’s shooting, or the emergence of looters and outside agitators. I’m talking about the reflexive hostility with which conservatives reacted to the news that protesters in Ferguson had organized a voter registration drive.

“If that’s not fanning the political flames, I don’t know what is,” Missouri GOP Executive Director Matt Wills told the conservative website Breitbart. “I think it’s not only disgusting but completely inappropriate.”

Breitbart described the drive as “efforts by liberal organizers to set up voter registration booths”—a rendering that reflects a few revealing assumptions. But let’s begin with the overarching one—that these organizers are engaged in something nefarious; that their real goal here is to advance ideological or partisan interests, unrelated to those implicated by the civic unrest.

................................

But whether you believe the registration drive is a direct response to events in Ferguson or rank liberal opportunism, the idea that registering black voters there is illegitimate or “disgusting,” particularly under these circumstances, does reveal a preference for the existing power imbalance—either on the merits, or because it's a price worth imposing on others to stifle minority participation in the political process. And on that abstract level it's an idea that shares a lot in common with actions that have intensified civil unrest in Ferguson for nearly a week.

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[notadmblnd]

1. I told my son and his friends the other day

If this doesn't motivate you kids to vote, nothing will.

[Kalidurga]

2. When they said Vote or Die

I had no idea they were serious.

[Fred Sanders]

3. Are arrest warrants the new poll tax, Jim Crow in disguise, because it sure smells like it?

Do arrest warrants increase around election times, especially local elections?

I can not imagine Eric Holder does not share the same questions.

[Rex]

4. Republicans are the biggest PROBLEM this country has ever faced.

At least in modern times.

[applegrove]

5. Republicans are used to getting a vote payoff when violence breaks out in particular communities.

Plays into the fear that keeps the 'base' lining up at the polls. In Ferguson we have people who are not acting like 'animals'. In Ferguson the people are signing up to vote. That scares the powers that be that rely on being able to scare their base.

[Warpy]

6. Anything that contributes to their ulcers and high blood pressure

has got to be a damned good thing.