Tuesday, June 11, 2019

gonna put this out there

The following claims need verification, but if true, they paint an ugly picture. Seen on Gab:


My buddy Steve, who writes only rarely on his blog, recently posted the following claim:

...Republicans have for a decade now been waging war on Democratically inclined voters of color, finding ever more creative ways to keep them from the polls.

Steve's post, alas, contains a number of false claims, but let's focus on the one above. The first interesting thing to note is what happens when you click over to the article that Steve linked to. The article says nothing—not a single thing—about "creative ways" or nefariously racist intentions; that's purely something that Steve has read into the piece.* The article merely notes that Republicans have sought "stricter" requirements for voters, and it enumerates some of them in the vaguest possible terms, never exploring the why behind the impetus for the restrictions,** and never noting that the restrictions themselves aren't particularly earth-shattering. Sloppy journalism. The article's author, showing his/her leftist bias, probably left out the reasoning behind the restrictions as a form of disingenuous cropping: writing about the restrictions' rationale would reveal how reasonable that rationale is, and we can't have that. This sort of cropping is a bit like the physical cropping of photographs to hide the shameful fact that you're campaigning in a half-empty church.

Side note: the Brennan Center for Justice, to which Steve linked, is hilariously described on Wikipedia as "a liberal or progressive, non-partisan law and [public-policy] institute." Sorry, but you can't be both lib/prog and non-partisan. Don't be coy about your agenda.



*I've heard worse, actually, and I blogged, at least obliquely, about some tricks apparently pulled by GOP sympathizers here.

**Don't you worry: I posted about the why just yesterday.



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