He Embodies The Meaning Of The Word

If Dubya wants to talk about “tragedy” in relations between Repugs and African Americans in this country, he can consider some recent history.

First, here is an example of the handiwork of Ohio Secretary of State (and now gubernatorial candidate) Kenneth Blackwell from the 2004 presidential election as noted in this fine Rolling Stone article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:

A five-month analysis of the Ohio vote conducted by the Democratic National Committee concluded in June 2005 that three percent of all Ohio voters who showed up to vote on Election Day were forced to leave without casting a ballot. That's more than 174,000 voters. ''The vast majority of this lost vote,'' concluded the Conyers report, ''was concentrated in urban, minority and Democratic-leaning areas.'' Statewide, African-Americans waited an average of fifty-two minutes to vote, compared to only eighteen minutes for whites.

...

In another move certain to add to the traffic jam at the polls, the GOP deployed 3,600 operatives on Election Day to challenge voters in thirty-one counties -- most of them in predominantly black and urban areas. Although it was billed as a means to ''ensure that voters are not disenfranchised by fraud,'' Republicans knew that the challengers would inevitably create delays for eligible voters. Even Mark Weaver, the GOP's attorney in Ohio, predicted in late October that the move would ''create chaos, longer lines and frustration.''

...

In Columbus, which had registered 125,000 new voters -- more than half of them black -- the board of elections estimated that it would need 5,000 machines to handle the huge surge. ''On Election Day, the county experienced an unprecedented turnout that could only be compared to a 500-year flood,'' says Matt Damschroder, chairman of the Franklin County Board of Elections and the former head of the Republican Party in Columbus. But instead of buying more equipment, the Conyers investigation found, Damschroder decided to ''make do'' with 2,741 machines. And to make matters worse, he favored his own party in distributing the equipment. According to The Columbus Dispatch, precincts that had gone seventy percent or more for Al Gore in 2000 were allocated seventeen fewer machines in 2004, while strong GOP precincts received eight additional machines. An analysis by voter advocates found that all but three of the thirty wards with the best voter-to-machine ratios were in Bush strongholds; all but one of the seven with the worst ratios were in Kerry country.

The result was utterly predictable. According to an investigation by the Columbus Free Press, white Republican suburbanites, blessed with a surplus of machines, averaged waits of only twenty-two minutes; black urban Democrats averaged three hours and fifteen minutes. ''The allocation of voting machines in Franklin County was clearly biased against voters in precincts with high proportions of African-Americans,'' concluded Walter Mebane Jr., a government professor at Cornell University who conducted a statistical analysis of the vote in and around Columbus.

And as Greg Palast notes at the end of this article (about the exploits of Cruela DeVil in Florida in the 2000 presidential election)...

It wasn’t reported in mainstream press, but the NAACP sued Katherine Harris and the gang for the black purge (re: the illegal removal of African Americans from the Florida voting rolls by ChoicePoint), and won. The state threw up its hands immediately and said, “You got us! Well put these people back as soon as we can.” We’re still waiting.

One more thing: it would have been nice if CNN had bothered to actually get a response from someone who heard what Bush had to say to give us some perspective on how the words of Dubya’s speechwriters had actually been received (and despite the fact that that clown resides in Texas, it should be pointed out that that is all he shares with Lyndon Johnson, who started out in public life as an educator, whereas Dubya is now what he has always been; a glad-handling shill and a total boob who doesn't know enough to avoid profanity into an open microphone or keep his hands off a female head of a foreign nation).

Update: Kos makes a great point here.