Good or Bad for the Jews

"Good or Bad for the Jews"

Many years ago, and for many years, I would travel to Morocco to visit uncles, cousins, and my paternal grandmother. Some lived in Tangiers;...

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Making Citizenship Meaningless: Thoughts on the Coming Great Electoral Fraud

Our progressive friends make many predictions and promises. Most, of course, fall flat. Look, for example, at Obamacare. Where are those millions of deprived uninsured Americans yearning to have health insurance so they can get that desperately needed medical care now denied them? Where are those healthy youngsters desperate to get off their parents' insurance dime and to fork out their own cash for the high premium and high deductible plans offered by Obamacare? Wherever they are, they are not overwhelming the Obamacare exchanges with their plaintive petitions. We have a mystery worthy of Hercule Poirot.

The multi-decade, trillion-plus-dollar war on poverty was another great promise. According to the progressives' own numbers, however, more Americans are now poor or near-poor than ever with more than ever dependent on taxpayer largesse. This is the result of fifty years of war on poverty. The progressive solution? More of the same policies that have produced the current disaster, with the added twist of addressing a "new evil," i.e., unequal income distribution. It seems that more progressivism means more poverty--except for the bureaucrats and academics plugged into the programs.

There exists, however, one promise on which the current gang of progressives running and ruining our nation will deliver. We will see a massive electoral fraud in the 2016 elections, at the latest. The signs are there. This will be much beyond past ACORN phony voter registration, "vote early and often" schemes, and having the deceased cast ballots. It will be on a scale never seen in the US.

The plot underway is nothing less than to make US citizenship meaningless.

Let's recognize that a hallmark of progressivism is to degrade any institution over which it obtains power. Be it in the name of fairness, equality, or the all purpose "righting of old wrongs," once progressive ideology and ideologues grab an institution, that institution becomes transformed and degraded as to make it almost unrecognizable. We have many examples of this, but perhaps none illustrates the process better than what has happened to higher education in the US and the West. A university degree has become as worthless as the education it certifies. Throughout the Western world we have legions of university graduates unqualified for anything gainful. They, however, are full of self-righteousness, arrogance, and a sense of entitlement. I doubt that today's average university graduate has the level of basic knowledge of the average high school graduate of 60-70 years ago.

Most universities have fallen under the rule of progressives, who reject the traditional canon of higher education, and replace it with a mishmash of politicized courses on feminism, sexism, racism, whacky environmentalism, and so on. A good example is my old school, UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles. This once noble institution has eliminated the requirement for its English department grads to read Shakespeare for which they may substitute gender/race classes. In fact, they can graduate as UCLA English majors without reading Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton. You can see here the snarky defense of this change by a progressive "education expert," who notes helpfully, that "single-author courses are tough to teach, and can be murder to take (guess what? Not everybody likes Chaucer enough to spend 15 weeks on him, and that’s OK.)" In other words, Chaucer is hard. Now, therefore, when ordering coffee at Starbucks, you will find that the "highly educated" barista operating the espresso machine cannot quote from "The Pardoner's Tale."

The universities underwent the classic progressive two-pronged attack now used on other institutions.  The progs bemoan the elitism and the bias against certain "victims" by the institution. The progs try with legislation, court rulings, street agitation, any means really, to modify admittance practices, and then once that is achieved to transform the institution into something else. Remember, for example, the debate over the voting age? "If you're old enough to get drafted, you're old enough to vote!" I always noted, of course, that women did not get drafted so that meant they either should, or they should not get the vote at eighteen. What if you didn't get drafted? Do you still get the vote? Anyhow, eighteen-year-olds got the vote; the draft got eliminated--eighteen-year-olds, however, still have the vote, as do women and draft-dodgers, one of whom even became President. The same process is underway with other traditional institutions such as marriage, the Boy Scouts and, of course, the military which is being subjected to social experimentation that has nothing to do with its core mission of defending the nation.

Now we see US citizenship under the same assault.

The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security tells us that the eleven million or so illegal aliens in the US have earned the right to be citizens. Secretary Johnson states,
“An earned path to citizenship for those currently present in this country is a matter of, in my view, homeland security to encourage people to come out from the shadows, to be accountable, to participate in the American experience, the American society."
The good Secretary cannot tell us what exactly these people who have broken our laws have done to earn citizenship except to demonstrate an ability to defeat the half-baked efforts of our Keystone Kop immigration services to apprehend and deport them. It seems that being a successful outlaw did not form part of the citizenship test when my parents and my wife took it.  We see calls for amnesty and "pathways" to citizenship coming not only from the usual Democrats and their crony capitalist allies and lobbyists, but from the RINOs who populate the ranks of the GOP. We hear lachrymose speeches about how an illegal alien who fought for our country in the military should have the right to become a citizen--these speakers "forget," of course, that, for now, it is illegal for an undocumented or a nonresident alien to enlist in the US military. We do not have Gurkhas. This is a variation on "if they're old enough to fight, they're old enough to vote," and is equally as bogus.

It gets worse. If it were "just" an effort to get citizenship and the benefits and obligations that go with it, it might earn a little more respect from me. It is nothing of the sort. It is a smokescreen for electoral fraud. Citizenship is under assault from another direction, as well. Voting I.D. Yes, that is the main weapon being used and the one which reveals what is really going on. Our Attorney General Eric "Fast and Furious" Holder tells us that his agency will be very vigilant re attempts by states to use voter identification requirements to "suppress" turn-out. The DOJ has been filing lawsuits against states with voter I.D. requirements (here and here, for example.) The justification? The progs conjure up an imaginary poor rural black too stupid, too poor, and living in such a remote place that he or she just cannot afford or otherwise get valid state identification. Nonsense. Many states offer free identification cards, and, more important, poor, middle class, and rich black people have valid identification documents for driving, buying property, getting bank loans, voting, etc., just like everybody else. Progs have a Hollywood version of race in America which they sell to the willing media, and seek to turn into public policy.

I have served as an observer in several elections overseas: Guyana, Guatemala, Bolivia, Panama, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. In addition, I have seen elections in other countries where I lived or temporarily worked, e.g., Spain, France, Switzerland, Mexico, India. In all of them, voters had to prove their identity and citizenship. Only in the USA is this a controversy. The progs, as noted, use a two pronged attack: one seeks citizenship for illegal aliens, and the other seeks ways for them, and resident aliens, to vote even without citizenship. The already lax regulations on official identification are being furthered loosened. In California, for example, the state now issues I.D. cards and driver's licenses to illegal aliens; in California, of course, as in many other states, one can register to vote when applying for a license or I.D. card. In addition, in California the state now licenses illegal aliens as lawyers and allows them to serve on juries. In virtually every state I can think of, illegal aliens already receive public benefits, including food stamps via programs which the USDA advertises in Mexico. When I lived in northern Virginia during the 2008 elections, I can tell you from personal observation that clearly ineligible people voted without challenge. As a former election observer, I would have a hard time certifying US elections in much of the country as free and fair. Basically, almost anybody can vote, and do so more than once, and it is getting easier and easier to do so.

We will see massive electoral fraud by 2016, at the latest. The manufactured "controversy" over voter I.D. and "pathways" to citizenship is really about getting millions of new Democratic voters casting ballots. It has nothing to do with black Americans, who demographically are in decline vis-a-vis other minority groups. To get this result, the progressives are more than willing to degrade the concept of citizen by making it available to just about anybody, while at the same time giving people without it the same rights and benefits.


23 comments:

  1. Pretty well sums it up. An excellent lay out of the institutions Progressives have taken over and destroyed in their relentless pursuit of power. If this doesn't illuminate how seductive and dangerous power can be, I know of nothing else. Now Progressives are trying to implement the destruction of the very thing they lust for power over, the country itself.

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  2. Re, the comparative utility of tertiary and secondary schooling. I suspect if you looked at it, you would find that secondary schooling in metropolitan centers outside the South equipped students as well or better than a secondary diploma conjoined to fulfillment of tertiary distribution credits today (or thirty years ago). However, there was considerable variation in the quality of schooling at that time and I would not hold much by a secondary diploma from large swaths of the United States. The county high school my better half attended was formed in 1955 from the merger of four rural high schools. The first graduating class had 40 students in it. That was for the general student population. It was in the upland South so the meagre black population was transported all over hell-and-gone to attend a tiny school elsewhere.

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  3. If the discussions I have in settings like this are any guide, the intramural culture within the Democratic Party is such that there would be little or no resistance to generalized electoral fraud, just as there is no resistance to the systemic misfeasance of the appellate judiciary. As far as partisan Democrats are concerned, there are no legitimate victories on the part of their opposition. Evidence of fraud would simply be denied, dismissed, or justified with transparent sophistries.

    Some of us recall that Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Morris Udall, and Jimmy Carter - men with vigorous ethical standards - were the men of prominence in the national Democratic Party. You just weep...

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  4. Something perhaps overlooked in the post and comments so far, and I hope we will be spared: an election widely perceived to have been "won" by fraud is likely to be decided in the streets.

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  5. Diplomad, while Eric "Fast and Furious" Hold sues my wonderful state of Texas over voter I.D. laws that were used for the first time last election, our state totally blows the "voter I.D. laws disenfranchise minorities" meme out of the water.

    In our last election, the first one where voter I.D. was required, minority voting was the greatest it ever has been. All those "disenfranchised" voters turned out in droves at the polls., presented their photo I.D., and voted.

    I also love how it seems that the areas of our state where voter fraud is rampant is in counties where Hispanics are the majority, not the minority. There was a youtube video of a woman describing how she was paid by local, state and federal candidates (Ciro Rodriquez, to be precise) to vote "mine" by going to nursing homes to help seniors fill out the absentee ballots those seniors were sent in the mail. How did she know when to go to the nursing homes? Simple, the person who worked for the country, and was in charge of sending those absentee ballots out, informed the woman what day they would go out so she could be at the nursing homes the day the ballots arrived.

    Voter fraud is rampant in Sheila Jackson Lee's district that is primarily black/Hispanic. So what becomes clear is that the voters being disenfranchised due to voter fraud by others canceling out their vote are primarily minorities, the very people Eric Holder claims to be protecting.

    Amnesty is designed to do one other major thing for the Democrats; turn Texas blue. But Texas is leading the trend of seeing Hispanic vote for Republicans, and not Democrats. As fracking has made many a poor Hispanic rich in Texas, they are just as reluctant to send their money to D.C. as any of us.

    Zane

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    1. The 1986 Amnesty turned California Blue. And look where we are now. Gerrymandered down to 1 Party rule.

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    2. KellyJ,

      I understand that, but you also need to understand that the relationship between Tejanos and Anglos in Texas is quite different than it is in California. And while there is the similarity of Spanish named towns, that is where the similarity ends.

      California never really struggled to pull away from Mexico like Texas did, and never really had the Mexican leaders fighting for independence like Texas did.

      Zane

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  6. Clearly where fraud is concerned, the waters have been tested. The media barely raised an eyebrow when precinct after precinct voted 100% for Obama. The fix was in and everyone could see it; perhaps no one saw it. One can only imagine how emboldened these folks will be next time.

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  7. “Zut alors, Hastings. I am at a loss for a solution!" – Poirot

    Sadly.

    Mr.Bill

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  8. Nothing angers me more than the way the proglodytes are trying to make "immigrant" synonymous with "illegal". When I was working as an ESOL teacher and getting all sorts of mail about "immigrant rights", I made it a point to write and tell one organization that they had forfeited any hope of getting a penny out of me by playing that sort of word game. I also made it a point to state that as the grandson, husband, and father-in-law of LEGAL immigrants, I felt that I had been personally insulted.

    Speaking as an old Consular scut, I know that our immigration law is flexible enough to deal with people whose only issue is illegal crossing and grant status if there's some major extenuating circumstance.

    @Zane, I hope you're right about the Hispanic vote in Texas.

    And, yes, as a professional swindler of the young--oops, public high school social studies teacher--I have also seen something of the Gramscian march through the institutions, and fear that the institutions are worse off for it.

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    1. Kepha,

      Take a look at a map of the Eagle ford shale area. A lot of it is in hard scrapple land where ranching earned enough money to put food on the table, hopefully. There is a lot of Tejano owned land in that area, and while being a liberal was easy for them when the government benefits they might be receiving was pulled from someone else's pocket, it becomes a whole different ball game when they are getting oil revenue checks and the government is taking the money out of their pocket.

      Remember, a conservative is a liberal that has been mugged by reality.

      Zane

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    2. Well, Zane, I see your point. There's a pretty orthodox liberal near and dear to me who's reached the conclusion that all Muslims are enemies regardless; and much as I don't like Islam, I don't go that far!

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  10. I think Hairy Reed's comment about "undocumented Americans" says it all about the Jackass party's view of illegal immigration. They mean "undocumented Democrats".

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    1. Not undocumented. Illegally documented. And now, soon, legally documented.

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  11. Well if Chaucer is too tough to teach (this is more about the quality of progressive lecturers than students) how about Walt Whitman, Hemingway or Twain? Still too tough I suspect, instead we have JayZ and Kanye West studies. Absolutely worthless, dimwits studying dimwits.
    The west generally is attempting to show how benevolent it is with former generations hard-earned benefits, allowing purely economic migrants of no value to the country who will forever be burden on the social services to obtain said services without contribution. It is unsustainable.
    The last two election cycles in the USA showed a narrow section of the population voting itself lifetime benefits without contribution. Often fraudulently as the Diplomad documents. This was encouraged by the democrats and has now been adopted by the republicans. I fear for your country, it looks more like Zimbabwe every day.
    Did anyone shout "you lie" during the SoTU? If not, why not?

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  12. Actually Voter ID doesn't stop voter fraud.
    1) It makes it more expensive by having to have a valid appearing fake ID for each registered voter name.
    2) it raises the stakes of fraud. The same DA that waives jail for vote fraud, prosecutes fake IDs used for cigarette and alcohol sales. When the charge is six months jail for one fake ID to pay for (not steal) something, how are they going to waive charges on dozens of fake IDs used to steal votes?

    Voter ID raises the cost and difficulty as well as the stakes for the perps at the bottom, and raises the consciousness of the illegitimacy for the previously unconcerned political middle.

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    1. A very good point about ID's. Back when the Clintonistas came into office, they decided to put a few more techno bells and whistles into the US passport, adding a little more expense for any law-abiding American who wished to travel. Yet I'm sure the back alley bad guys in Manila, Bangkok, and a few other places where they brokered or still broker fraudulent documents had the technology and were copying it skillfully within a month.

      And what you say about DAs' choices is also very valid.

      A better take would be for the Tea Party to control the Senate, and start investigating, impeaching, and removing about two thirds of the judges in this country.

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  13. I've lost track. Has the Supreme Court ruled on this absurd Justice Dept. position on Voter ID? And the obvious question--I assume that we need to let the House Republicans know that anyone who votes for amnesty will not be reelected. If we can't get them primaried in time, we'll have to run write-in candidates. So much terrible evil to stamp out and so little time.

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  14. A few years ago, I was an election worker in my suburban town, checking in voters. There was a young woman behind us who had registered as an election observer. I spoke to her at a break. She was a college student from Russia who was spending a semester in the US with relatives, and working on a project about international election procedures. She was astonished that we let people vote without showing ID. In Russia and every other country she had looked at, voter ID was mandatory.

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  15. Here is an excellent article about the decline of academia by the brilliant Victor Davis Hanson:

    http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/166996

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  16. Great piece, Dip. It really points out the evil that exists in the pursuit of power.

    Interesting article on the subject from Ann Coulter here:

    http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2014-01-29.html

    Excerpt: While 67 percent of native-born Americans believe our Constitution is a higher legal authority than international law, only 37 percent of naturalized citizens agree.

    No wonder they vote 2-1 for the Democrats.

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  17. I wonder if as a result of the drugs and crime resultant from the War on Poverty - that war has cost us more lives than any war wince WWII and more than any war Bush started.

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