Scared Tom

“You will defund ACORN, ya hear, boy?!” “Yassa, Massa Legree!”

That’s one of many possible anagrams for the word “Democrats.” They’re scared of a minority that’s on its figurative knees and have become the Uncle Toms of Congress. And the persecution of ACORN is the epitome of Democratic cowardice.

Let’s put their capitulation into perspective: Imagine latter-day African Americans bowing, scraping and running for cover in the middle of Watts or Harlem at the sight of a few Klansman, and ones not in mufti, walking down the street. Or imagine today’s empowered, independent and competitive women, using, for instance, female role models such as Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, suddenly acknowledging that a Republican crustacean such as John Derbyshire is right, after all, and set about cleaning his house? Imagine if these two large and empowered demographics unaccountably and for no reason whatsoever gave up all the civil rights won for them by their forebears.

This is pretty much what Democrats have done with our empowerment of them. Congress has become Uncle Tom’s Rotunda, the House That Ruthlessness Built. And, despite his obvious intelligence and eloquence, President Barack Obama, sad to say, is the biggest Uncle Tom of all, the tuxedo-wearing butler who enjoys a little more status than the rest but, from time to time, is still reminded of his place.

Otherwise why would Obama, who was once deeply affiliated with ACORN, say on national television that ACORN “deserves to be investigated”? If it was merely another instance of Obama throwing a former ally under the wheels of the bus in order to tamp down the unquenchable racist fires of the Far Right, it would be lamentable enough. Yet once Democrats realized that Obama would not stand up to defend ACORN from allegations from those who also don’t believe he’s an American and that there are still death panels, they broke their necks to join Republicans in defunding ACORN, with only seven Democrats in the Senate (including Durbin and Burris of Illinois) backing the community activist organization.

Where was this Democratic outrage over electoral fraud in the wake of the 2000 elections? On, appropriately, April Fool’s Day last year, Art Levine of The American Prospect wrote an article entitled, The Republican War on Voting in which he simply but ingeniously compared the largely law-abiding, sternly self-auditing ACORN with the various Republican mechanisms that were found guilty of throwing out Democratic registration forms, ballot-dumping and engaging in vote-caging to keep non-Republicans from the polls.

Somehow, despite us living in an electronic age in which good information and knowledge is at our fingertips, we the people persist in believing that voter fraud is a much more serious and endemic problem than Republican electoral fraud.

States, including Florida, had been plausibly accused, as have other red states, of throwing out Democratic voter registration forms and ballots yet no one in Congress proposed touching their federal funding. Do a Google search using the key words, “2000, registrations, thrown out, Republican” and you will get 2,090,000 hits. It’s not as if it hasn’t been established in the mainstream media that the biggest advantage to Republicans for the last three decades has been to suppress the vote and those who seek to get out the vote among the poor and disenfranchised who only get to wield their tiny power once every 730 days.

How soon we’ve forgotten the prescient words of Reagan goon Paul Weyrich when he said back in 1980, “I don't want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” So who’s next in the crosshairs? ACORN’s erstswhile partner, Project Vote? And will Democrats, in true Uncle Tom fashion, be the spotter for Republican snipers?

We’ve seen Democratic capitulation more times than unearthed Republican scandals in the relatively brief time since the Democrats took control of Congress and, later, the White House. Time and again, we’ve seen, through the jihad against Moveon.org and their “General Betray us” ad down to the Salem witch hunt of ACORN, a majority party that’s too cowed by the spindly-legged Simon Legree as he cross hatches their backs with a whip to realize that they’re the ones who are large and in charge, scared Toms too stupid and crazed with fear to realize that they will always get such treatment from the vastly outnumbered master no matter how hard they try to be good and remember their place.