Yesterday’s NPR offering informed me about work in the name of voter fraud prevention that has the effect of disenfranchising a lot of eligible voters. This morning’s news reveals that massive voter list purges in six states may violate federal laws. All of this brings me to a piece of mail I got a couple of weeks ago. The GOP in Florida sent me all the forms I needed to sign up for absentee ballots. To be fair, the forms were in the names of my parents who have been dead for some years now, but that doesn’t seem to bother the Florida GOP very much. Just an observation. Make of it what you will.
What do I make of it? Traditions continue in politics. The Republican tradition in Florida brings to mind a story regarding the Democrat tradition in Bexar County, Texas, when Lyndon Johnson was getting started.A young man was sitting on the curb crying. When asked why he said, \”My dead grandparents came to town to vote for Lyndon Johnson, but they didn\’t bother to come to see me.\”
I was about to make a comment similar to that of geezer dude about Lyndon Johnson. In South Texas, which is largely Mexican-American, \”cleaning up the voter lists\” does not include removing the names of the dead. When Lyndon was running for the Senate in 1948, his aides called the Demo boss in Duval County, run by a certain man named Parr, and asked, in a very close race, how many votes Lyndon had so far in that county. Boss Parr anwered, \”How many do you need?\” Johnson finally won, by a hair, 87 votes out of over two million. The disputed votes in Duval County could not be found, \”The janitor, who did not speak English, had emptied the ballot boxes and burned the ballots.\” So LBJ got the nickname, \”Landslide Lyndon\”. Most people in Texas just laughed; they knew Lyndon Johnson was a crook, but he was an effective crook for Texas! When Johnson was running for re-election as president in 1964, he persuaded the nation that Goldwater would involve the nation in war, which Johnson piously promised that he himself would not do! Most voters in the US believed him; Texans never did, but voted for him anyway. And so the Vietnam War went on and on!
I cannot resist adding a persoonal anecdote involving LBJ: While he was President, I had his daughter, Lynda,in a Latin clsss at UT Austin. I had been carefully screened first by the Secret Service, and an agent accompanied her to my class each day. He sat at the back of the room, in a jacket with a visible bulge under one arm that I knew concealed a firearm. I was very careful of everything I said in that class! I made no jokes, of any kind! Sometime later that year, some of her professors were invited to a picnic at his ranch, nearby, and her favorite professor, in Political Science, was invited. I wss not invited. I was too boring!
Congratulations Dr. B. Consider it a privilege not to have been invited.CP
OOPS! I may have named the wrong county in Texas, but the essence of the story is correct.If it wasn\’t such a compromise of personal ethics, I would encourage you to make use of the opportunity for absentee voting provided so generously by the Republican party. Actually using the ballots to vote for Democrats might be justified as an ethical choice to balance against the possible intent of providing absentee ballots to deceased people. We can probably justify almost anything if we are wise enough and our goals are sufficiently lofty. (Ouch! I bit my tongue again! It seems to always be in my cheek.)