Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Trust me, I know a lot about your rights

Having just rewatched All the President's Men, complete with pauses every couple of minutes to fill in my poor co-viewer on some pointless Nixon trivia and wet my pants with excitement, this made me laugh pretty hard:
The Family Foundation Action has a robocall out from the former Nixon conspirator and minister Chuck Colson, urging citizens to vote for a rather unusual reason: "I know what it is to lose your right to vote," he says, referring to the felon disenfranchisement laws that kept him from the polls.
The robocall is playing in Virginia, and it doesn't go so far as to endorse anyone, it does highlight the sacred privilege of voting, something Colson laments having lost. Here's Chuck Colson, in a little more detail. As a little bit of icing on the cake, he was the dude who, beyond Watergate, the Ellsberg affair, and the subsequent cover-ups of both, suggested firebombing the Brookings Institution. The question I have is this: who is going to vote because Charles Colson tells them to? If you are in the minority of people who remember/care about his large role in criminalizing an entire leg of the three-legged stool that is the American government, is this going to convince you to get out there and punch some ballots? And if you don't know who he is, what does this achieve?

No comments:

Post a Comment