On Monday, Joan Walsh continued her crusade against conservatives when she authored an article entitled "Mitt's loathsome lie" for Salon.com. This piece, which was supposed to focus on the Department of Justice lawsuit in Ohio to block a law which extends early voting privileges to active-duty military members, evolves from criticism to a bizarre claim that Catholic bishops are part of a "military group" and have become "become an unregistered arm of the GOP."
Walsh began by introducing the issue: a bill by the Ohio legislature (which she is quick to accuse of being "Republican-dominated") to limit early voters to active-duty military members who would be unable to vote on Election Day. Obviously, this is a ploy by the GOP, which "keeps finding sneakier ways to disenfranchise those Americans who might be inclined to vote for Democrats" to swing the Ohio vote using "GOP resentment machine logic."
Walsh thinks that the GOP is trying to disenfranchise voters in Ohio. Instead of stopping there, however, she proceeds to make a string of seemingly random statements that have no relation to the argument. She says that anti-discrimination laws protection women and gays are "special protections," and then quips that, "as we know, gay marriage is an attack on straight marriage." What does this have to do with the Ohio law? In a word: nothing. Then comes a bewildering attack on Catholic bishops:
It’s true that some military and veterans’ groups gave ballast to the Romney lie by either questioning or outright opposing the Justice Department’s efforts. A kind interpretation would hold that the groups were concerned that military members not lose rights under any Ohio deal with the DOJ. (A less kind interpretation would note that some military groups, like the Catholic bishops, have become an unregistered arm of the GOP.)
No explanation is offered as to how Catholic bishops are a military group.
Finally, Walsh makes a feeble attempt to circle back to the basic argument: the GOP is a group of voter-suppressing nuts and that it is "pretty slick" of Mitt Romney to use the Ohio voting law against Obama. For proof, she uses the examples of Kansas and Alabama which are "controlled by Republican governors and legislatures" and have the audacity to "require would-be voter to provide proof of citizenship before registering" and Florida and Iowa which "barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising hundreds of previously eligible voters."
Apparently, the facts that being a citizen of the United States is a perquisite for voting and people who have been convicted of a felony lose their right to vote are irrelevant.
Such statements by Walsh cause me to question what she and other left-leaning 'journalists' have any sort of grasp of voting legislation whatsoever, or if they want to blindly enfranchise any individual who feels they have the right to vote - providing of course, that they will vote for Obama.
Walsh, a frequent guest on MSNBC, routinely attacks conservatives with incoherent arguments. In March, she wondered, "What's the matter with white people?"
