So it’s like this.
The Greedy Obstructionist Party has nominated a “presidential candidate” who arrogantly refuses to release his taxes to the American people, and thus he foists himself on the very people he supposedly wants to serve. It’s an unprecedented affront to the integrity and intelligence of the American electorate.
Or is it.
Week after week now, roughly half of the people polled in our electorate claim they will actually vote for a man who refuses to respect the honorable tradition of our presidential candidates to reveal their taxes to their fellow countrymen and women— a tradition started by his own father. Ann Romney infamously stated that it would just be giving more “ammunition” to the opposition to attack them; She added, “All you people” already have enough information.
And she’s absolutely right. They know they’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. Assuming Romney never releases his taxes, ignoring such a basic qualifying bar for the highest office in our land, most sensible Americans would go to polls and bury him in his own hubris. And if the Romneys were to disclose the real extent to which they store their ill-gotten corporate-raider wealth in other countries famous for their “legal” tax-sheltering devices, the American people would be obligated to go to the polls and punish them for it. But such a principled outcome is far from guaranteed in today’s American electorate.
Although the several despicable Republican sponsored “voter I D” bills are utterly abhorrent to the lovers of democracy, they pale in comparison with another, more insidious and potentially disastrous downside to our nation’s sloppy and haphazard franchise— one which places the precious right of suffrage into the hands of an increasingly enormous number of ignorant, uneducated, socially backward and completely propagandized “citizens.” You know them as as wingnuts, teabaggers, Birchers, RWNJs, and racists; and you know them as predominantly Republicans.
Representative government presupposes an intelligent, efficient, and universal electorate. The character of such a government will always be determined by the character and caliber of those who compose it. In fact, the very survival of our democracy depends on successful representative government; and that success is conditioned upon electing only those individuals who are technically trained, intellectually competent, socially loyal, and morally fit. Does that sound like the rank and file of today’s Republican party, and their gaggle of fractious, obstructionist, scientifically backward, and sometimes overtly racist elected members?
It’s late in the game of 2012, now. Our only hope, as Bill Clinton says, is “arithmetic.” The number of voters who have this nation’s best interests in mind, the number of voters who simply demand to first know that a presidential candidate is at least financially and thus morally fit to be our president— must far outnumber those who do not— and send Willard Romney to the political trash heap of history.
