Don't Sugar-Coat It, Roger

As reported by Ryan J. Reilly at TalkingPointsMemo, Roger Vadum, in an article in The American Thinker entitled Columnist: Registering Poor To Vote 'Like Handing Out Burglary Tools To Criminals', says:

"It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote" ...

"Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor. It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money. It's about raw so-called social justice. It's about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers."

As the TPM article point out, conservative efforts to suppress the ability to vote of the poor, blacks, immigrants, and students -- voting blocs which skew heavily Democratic -- are usually presented as aimed at preventing voter fraud (even though proven incidents of voter fraud are virtually nonexistent in the U.S. in any place, at any time). But Vadum doesn't pussyfoot around the reason: Poor people shouldn't have the vote.

As Alex Pareene says at Salon.com:

Two days after Rolling Stone posted Ari Berman's very good piece on how the GOP campaign against ACORN and "voter fraud" is actually just part of a coordinated effort to stop minorities and poor people from voting at all, right-wing "investigative journalist" Matthew Vadum has now explicitly endorsed disenfranchising poor people for the sole reason that they're poor and will vote for people who will do things to alleviate their poverty. It is positively Swiftian, if Jonathan Swift had been an actual cannibal.

Pareene also says:

When you write that you actually just oppose letting poor people vote, you're giving the game away. You're never supposed to openly state the goals of the conservative movement, because no one but a small cadre of sociopaths actually supports them. (This is why Frank Luntz was invented.)

Mathew Vadum is so incredibly dumb that he probably should not be allowed to vote.

Here's a link to that article, Right-wing hack says helping poor people vote is criminal.

And here's a link to another Vadum article, Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American.