It used to be said of Republican President Gerald Ford, he was too dumb to chew gum and cross a room at the same time. His legacy lives on in the right wing inability to see the logical consequences of their policies that should be causing them to shudder in horror.
The most recent example should have the Tea Party out in the streets all night, setting fire to piles of discarded tires and throwing molotov cocktails off roofs.
Thanks to right wing republican governments in Arizona and Kansas, voters who come to voting booths in those states now must show a valid ID, proving to the satisfaction of poll workers, they are citizens.
The logical consequence of this is pretty obvious. Soon, simply walking down the street or being admitted to a hospital or opening a bank account, or boarding an airplane, anyone can be denied service or even stopped by police and arrested if they do not have proof of identity.
Oh . . . wait . . . that’s not going to happen “soon.” It is already standard practice.
What irony. Our best generation fought World War 2 to prevent that very thing from happening. During the 1940s, before television was a national medium (the singular form of the abused word “media”) movies and radio were the way the cultural and political messages of the day were promoted and shared.
If you go back and look at how the war time movies and radio explained the horrors of a dictatorship, there was a shorthand moment in all the war time dramas that depicted life under repressive regimes.
A character, usually our hero or heroine, would be on a train or sitting in a cafe. Two men in long coats, with large lapels, wide-brim slouch hats and Germanic accents would step into the scene and say, “Papers, please.”
Right there was our Just Cause, to maintain the world we knew, a world of Liberty where no one could stop you in the midst of lawful activity and demand you prove who you are. No thug in a uniform could take you away just because you can’t satisfy him as to who you are.
Thanks to our Right Wing friends, that now exists across the Good Ole.
The next line spoken by the thugs usually was, “Come with us.”