It's OK if voting takes effort. Plus: Media's Liz Cheney crush will fade. And, sleep, Snow White.
By Gary Abernathy
It’s okay to require some planning & effort to vote
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis today signed into law his state’s new voting regulations, and many in the media are reacting, predictably, as if it includes poll taxes and literacy tests.
USA Today reports, “The law will force 2022 candidates to rethink their get-out-the-vote strategies given the obstacles it will provide for mail-in voting and third-party ballot collection and dropoffs.” CNN said the bill is “aimed at curbing access to mail-in voting in the state, joining a host of other GOP-led states pushing new limits…” NBC News headlined it as a “restrictive voting law.”
For some, any legislation that requires people to make any effort at all to cast a ballot is defined as “restrictive.” But not having a drop box on every corner, or requiring people to prove they are who they say they are – and are legally eligible to vote – is not “voter suppression.”
As I noted in a recent Post column, it’s okay if some planning and effort are required to vote, and “how much better would our government be if elections were decided by voters participating only because of their own sense of duty and patriotism, not because they were harassed by partisan operatives, or because the government ordered more drop boxes conveniently placed or millions of ballots mailed directly to homes?”
Making voting as easy as falling out of bed should not be our goal. After an early overreaction to Georgia’s new voting laws, many in the media had to backtrack and admit that the new regs weren’t as bad as they initially claimed – and that some Democrat-controlled states have the same laws, or laws that are even more restrictive.
Media’s embrace of Liz Cheney will fade quickly
If we needed another reminder of why it’s a bad idea for Republicans to be forcing Rep. Liz Cheney out of her House leadership role, liberal New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow provides it.
Blow writes that while Cheney might be celebrated now by many as someone who “got it right and did the right thing,” her conservative past should not be forgotten. Blow reminds readers that both Cheney and her father, former vice president Dick Cheney, supported the “torture program under the Bush administration,” and that Liz Cheney in 2009 refused to denounce “birthers” who were questioning Barack Obama’s eligibility to be president.
Blow adds some other “transgressions” to his list, and then concludes that “…her present position does not expunge her past positions. The sword she’s falling on is one she has spent her political career brandishing. If Cheney is punished by her own party, I will not applaud, but I also will not sob. I sit silently in acknowledgment, as one does, when karma swings low and performs its function.”
It’s a great reminder that Republicans who are lionized by Big Media are only praised for as long as they’re criticizing their own party, as past Republican flavor-of-the-moment media heroes learned. Cheney has been a stalwart conservative, and the GOP should remember that – just as Cheney should remember that her current status as a media darling will be short-lived.
Here’s why political correctness is so despised
Here’s the latest sign that the world has gone insane, courtesy of USA Today: “Disneyland’s revamped Snow White ride is facing backlash over Snow White and Prince Charming’s kiss while she’s asleep.”
As you might recall, Snow White is in a deep sleep from which she cannot awaken, thanks to an evil queen, until Prince Charming’s kiss snaps her out of it, and then they live, as they say, happily ever after.
An editor and a reporter for SFGATE don’t like it. Not one bit. They combined on authoring an article stating, “It's hard to understand why the Disneyland of 2021 would choose to add a scene with such old fashioned ideas of what a man is allowed to do to a woman.”
So, better to sleep forever in a coma due to an evil curse than to be awakened by the kiss of a prince. Got it.
Have a nice day.
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