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" Because, late in his second term, the president has become somewhat expert at trolling his opponents, we&amp;#039;re all talking about voting again. On Wednesday, in a speech in Cleveland, the president mused that it would be a terrific thing if everybody who was eligible to vote put down the damn remote, got their lazy ass out of the La-Z-Boy, and did their fking democratic duty because there are millions of people around the world who would wear a gaboon viper as a necktie for the opportunity we have to choose our leaders. I am paraphrasing here somewhat.  &amp;quot;If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country,&amp;quot; Obama said, calling it potentially transformative. Not only that, Obama said, but universal voting would &amp;quot;counteract money more than anything.&amp;quot;  He also mentioned that, in Australia, people are required to vote. This ignited a number of frontal lobes, including those of the Dolphin Queen, who believes that the right of the people to fk off shall not be abridged.  Most of us are moved by the sight of citizens lined up at the polls on Election Day. We should urge everyone to care enough to stand in that line. But we should not harass or bother those who, with modesty and even generosity, say they are happy to leave the privilege of the ballot to those who are engaged.  &amp;quot;Generosity&amp;quot;? Moving along to the more lucid of our fellow primates, we find one Nina Easton, who happened by Fox News to explain that it is opposition to voter-suppression laws that is the true threat to the franchise. To reach this conclusion, of course, it is necessary to have the cognitive part of your brain do a one-and-a-half somersault in the pike position. Easton, god love her, really sticks the entry.  Easton: ..but this is based on two canards that his president cited in that same speech. One is that quote, as he puts it some folks prevent people from voting, which of course is a reference to voter ID laws in states. It&amp;#039;s ridiculous that people don&amp;#039;t have ID&amp;#039;s to vote. You have to have an ID to work. You have to have an ID to check into a doctor&amp;#039;s office and by this continued argument that you shouldn&amp;#039;t have an ID is just ghettoizing some people.  &amp;quot;Ghettoizing some people&amp;quot;? Take the afternoon off, Dr. Turing. We won&amp;#039;t be needing your machine today. How does arguing that what are clearly attempts to restrict the franchise -- because they are laws meant to respond to a problem that doesn&amp;#039;t exist -- &amp;quot;ghettoize&amp;quot; anyone? And then, of course, there is Tucker Carlson, the pilot of a bathysphere in search of wherever it is that his career sank, being horrified by the president&amp;#039;s plan to frog-march him into a voting booth.  Well, he&amp;#039;s making the classic liberal mistake of assuming that everything that&amp;#039;s virtuous ought to be mandatory, you know, brushing your teeth, putting the seat down... there ought to be a law! In fact voting only works because it is voluntary. You wouldn&amp;#039;t want to be governed by people who are too uninformed or lazy to make it to the polls on Tuesday. I mean, that&amp;#039;s the whole beauty of it. I would say there was a troubling part in his comments at the end of what you just played, where he muttered darkly about how unseen forces were trying to prevent lower income and minority voters from voting. That&amp;#039;s racial demagoguery. That&amp;#039;s what it looks like. In fact in the last election, 2012, African American voters voted in a larger proportion to white voters. That&amp;#039;s just a flat out lie and it&amp;#039;s designed to make people afraid and move them on the basis of fear and it&amp;#039;s wrong.  What has sent people like the Dolphin Queen and Easton spiraling into incoherence -- and Carlson ducking back behind the dickitude that is his only remaining marketable skill? It is the simple fact that the Republican party, and the conservative movement that is its only real political energy, have concluded in tandem that they cannot persuade an actual majority of the people eligible to vote in America to support their continued effort to establish a retrograde, racially exclusive plutocracy. This realization first struck Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the modern conservative movement who, more than 30 years ago, declined to use his inside voice while talking about it.  &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.&amp;quot;  That is the ur-moment for all the forces that have combined to restrict the franchise for the four decades since the blood and death in Alabama helped crack the Jim Crow ballot in the South. There is a through-line from Selma, to Weyrich, to Kris Kobach in Kansas, to John Roberts&amp;#039;s declaration of the Day Of Jubilee in the Shelby County case. It is the ultimate long game that they&amp;#039;re playing. Now, the anodyne suggestion that the country would be better off if everybody voted -- a banal truism that we used to teach back when we still taught civics -- is the spark of a national &amp;quot;debate&amp;quot; among our political elites, most of whom seem suffused with the spirit of what Flavius was talking about at the beginning of Julius Caesar:  I&amp;#039;ll walk around and force the commoners off the streets. You do the same, wherever the crowds are thick.   Flavius was afraid that a popular mandate could lead to actual tyranny. (So did many of our own Founders.) What we have today is the notion that democratic participation in the creative act of self-government could lead to the tyranny of equality under the law. Those Roman elites had a point. Our own elites have only the echo of vacant chatter in their empty souls. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a33818/voting-is-fundamental/>