Let's Do the Election Over.....

Oh for cryin out loud!

(are you impressed that I cleaned up my language?).

Florida and Michigan are said to be close to a plan to redo the primary elections with a mail-in ballot. I am not wild about the idea for two reasons. First, the idea of a mail-in ballot will begin to undermine the voting process in this country. The chance of fraud is already significant, being able to mail a ballot in will not improve things.

Second, the issue here is NOT how the elections in Florida and Michigan were conducted, it is when. The primary elections were conducted on dates that were in violation of both Democratic and Republican party rules, and as such, the results of both races, delegates to the national conventions, were sanctioned in a manner that was deemed to be fitting by the leadership of the respective parties. The dates were selected in those states in an effort to make those states primaries a bit more important, to carry more weight that they ordinarily would in the overall scheme of things. They do affect the national elections, in that they carry weight with a national party, but they select no officeholder, nor bestow no power or authority on anyone. They are, in a sense, private, in that they carry no governmental or public authorizations. This is not an issue of denial of the right to be heard, or to have one's vote counted by government or some other authoritarian rabble. It is an effort for a candidate of one party to pull a lot of strings and call in a lot of markers to make an end run around the rules of the game in order to better his/her positionin the race for the parties nomination.

Period.

It is cheating.

It is the kind of bullshit the Karl Rove and Dick Cheney would come up with, then sit and keep a straight face as they explained it away in a perfectly low-keyed and reasonable tone of voice. It is the kind of bullshit the the likes of Rush Limbaugh would come up with as a fair way of winning without having to use a gun.

This kind of crap is why G.W. Bush is the kind of man and President that he is.

Pay no attention to the man/woman behind the curtain.