By David Edwards
Tuesday, August 14, 2012 11:02 EDT
The author behind HBO’s popular Game of Thrones series recently blasted “Republicans and their Teabagger allies” for what he called “ongoing attempts at voter suppression” by enacting voter photo ID laws in various states.
“I would be remiss if I do not at least make passing mention of how depressed, disgusted, and, yes, angry I’ve become as I watch the ongoing attempts at voter suppression in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Iowa, and other states where Republicans and their Teabagger allies control key seats of power,” George R.R. Martin wrote on his blog on Saturday.
“It is one thing to attempt to win elections,” he continued. “But trying to do so by denying the most basic and important right of any American citizen to hundreds and thousands of people, on entirely spurious grounds… that goes beyond reprehensible. That is despicable.”
Martin was referring to Republican efforts to pass laws that require a photo ID for voting, efforts that research shows suppresses the votes of poor, elderly, young and minority voters despite the fact that few cases of voter fraud have been documented.
The “Song of Fire and Ice” author went on to lament the disappearance of “Republicans of conscience” like Everett Dirksen, Clifford Case, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Scranton and Barry Goldwater.
He added: “The people behind these efforts at disenfranchising large groups of voters (the young, the old, the black, the brown) are not Republicans, since clearly they have scant regard for our republic or its values. They are oligarchs and racists clad in the skins of dead elephants.”
“And don’t tell me they are libertarians either. No true libertarians would ever support a culture where citizens must ‘show their papers’ to vote or travel. That’s a hallmark of a police state, not a free country.”
Martin is a Democrat, and though he has said that Barack Obama is “the most intelligent president we’ve had since Jimmy Carter,” he doesn’t think the current president has been a “good leader” due to a 2010 extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
“From where I sit, it smells more like capitulation than compromise. Give a lot, get almost nothing,” Martin wrote in December 2010. “He doesn’t seem to have the stomach for a fight. We need another FDR, another JFK, another LBJ.”
A recent analysis by News21, part of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, determined that voter fraud “is virtually non-existent”
“Analysis of the resulting comprehensive News21 election fraud database turned up 10 cases of voter impersonation. With 146 million registered voters in the United States during that time, those 10 cases represent one out of about every 15 million prospective voters,” News21′s Natasha Khan and Corbin Carson wrote.
[Photo: YouTube/HBO]
(h/t: The Huffington Post)
