Bob Herbert had a column in the New York Times September 25 that by all rights deserved strong mainstream media attention based on the importance of its subject matter.
The Don Imus and Bill O’Reilly controversies paled into comparative insignificance next to what Republicans are doing to African Americans seeking the basic right of congressional representation in the seat of the nation’s federal government, Washington, D.C.
Despite all the bold talk by leading Republican Party operatives that the party seeks to reach out to everyone including minorities, this claim has once more been reduced to hypocritical posturing due to the point Herbert made that is receiving so little comment within the mainstream media.
African Americans have been rebuffed by Republicans in an attempt to secure voting rights in Congress through the creation of a congressional seat in Washington, D.C. The Republican race card is alive and regrettably doing all too well.
The strategy unveiled by the Cheney-Bush neoconservative ruling junta was to summon enough no votes to destroy the proposal. Given the track record of the Cheney-Bush team such a rebuff is anything but unexpected.
George W. Bush would have been defeated in the 2000 presidential election by losing the crucial and deciding state of Florida to Al Gore.
Voting recounts aside, Gore would have had a reasonably comfortable winning margin had the team of George’s brother Jeb, Florida’s governor, and Florida’s Secretary of State Katherine Harris not devised a blatantly racist tactic of disenfranching alleged "ex-felons" through a scrub list that contained scores of legally registered minority voters.
Republican Party insensitivity to African American voters extended to the festivities surrounding George W. Bush’s inauguration in January 2001. The belle of the ball turned out to be not incoming first lady Laura Bush but Katherine Harris. She proved to be the highlight of gala Washington soirees, receiving numerous ovations for her stalwart efforts on Bush’s behalf.
Many astute observers predicted a rerun of 2000 with the battleground shifted to Ohio, which proved to be the crucial decider of John Kerry’s challenge of incumbent Bush. Another successful effort was unleashed to disenfranchise African Americans.
The element that was most galling of all in 2004 was that this time the Darth Vader for African Americans was an African American, self-proclaimed born again Christian Secretary of State Ken Blackwell.
With plenty of help from the neocon team led by Karl Rove, Blackwell jockeyed polling stations so that voting became an easy event for affluent whites with comfortable numbers for each station.
Meanwhile a nightmare scenario was established for African American voters. Polling stations in minority districts, particularly in the state’s most populous city of Cleveland, were considerably fewer in number than those frequented by affluent Republicans. Huge lines were the result on a day that was cold and rainy.
In one instance voting was a simple process without lines. In the other instance African Americans risked pneumonia to brave long lines to cast votes for John Kerry.
Despite that supreme disadvantage engineered by Blackwell, there were still enough Kerry votes to overcome his scurrilous effort to swing Ohio for Bush.
Ohio Libertarian Party leader Bob Fitzakis was able to generate enough funds through an independent effort to launch a recount.
The conclusion, which Republicans have not even attempted to refute, was that Kerry carried Ohio while shenanigans by Blackwell and his consorts changed that result in Bush’s favor.
A report by Congressman John Conyers that is available for downloading free of charge on the Internet conclusively establishes that a theft was accomplished in Ohio in 2004 just as Florida had been shamefully stolen from Al Gore in 2000.
A measure of justice was achieved in 2006 when both Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell suffered humiliating defeats in races for the U.S. Senate in Florida and the Ohio governorship respectively.
Just remember when you think about the deaths in Iraq and the destruction of basic liberties in America the damage wrought by Republican vote theft in 2000 and 2004, and how scores of African Americans were deprived of a fundamental constitutional right of voting in a presidential election.
With that kind of track record the refusal to provide African Americans and other residents of Washington, D.C. with a vote in Congress should be construed under the category of business is usual.
Ah yes, and there is more. How about the fact that four leading Republican candidates refused to even participate in an African American sponsored presidential debate?
Just think. The Republicans are supposed to be the "Party of Lincoln." How the Great Emancipator from Illinois would castigate the race card playing, ruthless crew that has run roughshod in the party he helped found.