Listen to podcast of my discussion of the matter with Dallas KRLD radio host Scott Braddock. And read my piece at Huffington Post below.

A right-wing group in Houston engaged in a systematic voter suppression and intimidation effort used a doctored photo in its showcase video. Tellingly, a hand-lettered sign carried by an African-American woman at a 2000 Florida, Gore-Lieberman recount rally was changed from, “Don’t Mess With Our Vote,” to read, “I Only Got to Vote Once.”

Huffington Post editors first suspected the photoshopping after I posted “Possible Arson and the Right’s Texas Voter Suppression Effort” regarding King Street Patriots’ attacks on a nonprofit voter registration effort and the mysterious fire that destroyed all of Harris County’s (Houston) voting machines.

In my regular Sunday FireDogLake column, I posted a follow-up piece, “Contempt for Democracy: Attacks on Voting Rights,” that included a link to DigitalDupes.org, which had launched an effort to locate the original photo. Within hours, Newshounds found it.

In addition, a Gore/Lieberman sign was altered to read, “I’m With Stupid.” Here is the doctored video as presented in King Street Patriots’ video, followed by the original photographs.

The King Street Patriots video has disappeared from their website (soon after the deception was revealed), but it remains on YouTube. UPDATE: Video still at King Street Patriots site affiliate, TrueTheVote.org. Here it is:

In the video, King Street leader Catherine Engelbrecht says their effort is all about the truth, that they just want true, fair, honest elections. But if they are so committed to the truth, why did they use doctored photos? Why did they lie?

Because their real intent — as it has been for similar voter suppression efforts for decades — is to create barriers between the ballot box and the voters. They want to suppress the vote of people they suspect of opposing their agenda. In this case, as in most, that means assaulting the voting rights of the poor and minorities.

Their pious and sanctimonious rhetoric works — most of the time. Political journalists seldom get beyond the “he said/she said” accusations and counter-accusations in voting controversies. This deception, in a showcase video, puts the lie to King Street Patriots claims to the truth and destroys whatever credibility they might have had.

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Of course, they say they just want fair and open elections. “It’s really about truth,” says King Street founder Catherine Engelbrecht in an 8-minute video that includes doctored images and phony charges of “fraud” against…well, you only see pictures of African-Americans when fraud is discussed, so the implication is clear.

Maybe it was just coincidence that the warehouse containing all — all — of Houston’s voting machines burned down mysteriously just as King Street Patriots and their ally, Tax Assessor-Collector Leo Vasquez, went public with their fraud allegations. Whatever the case, the voter intimidation and suppression campaign is clearly part of a well-funded national effort to put barriers in the way of voters suspected of disagreeing with the perpetrators’ right-wing agenda.

The contempt for democracy demonstrated by partisans who think noting of violating the fellow citizens’ right to vote is staggering. Not only are election outcomes potentially altered, the health of civil society itself is altered.

I wrote that back in 2004 after surveying decades of GOP voter suppression campaigns for my book, The Politics of Deceit. Voter suppression is the most under-reported political scandal of my lifetime, and it pains me to admit that I under-reported it myself when I was a political writer for daily newspapers.

Journalists tend to shrug it off as a kind of prankish misdemeanor. But mail pieces like that one pictured above (read about it at Lone Star Project) are clearly intended to scare would-be voters into thinking any misstep will land them in jail. Mailers like this are now a common part of every election.

Groups like King Street Patriots hide behind rhetoric that they are the guardians of fair, open and honest elections. If that is true, why do they lie? Why do they invent stories of fraud where none exist? Why do they doctor images in their video? If truth is what they want, why do they poison it?

Their lies betray their real goal: to limit the voting rights of their political opponents. Let me detail one of their lies. They claim repeatedly that in Houston, six people are registered to a vacant lot. The claim is the symbolic center of their phony accusations of voter fraud.

It didn’t take very many minutes of research to discover how ridiculous this charge was. Incidentally, the Liberty Institute has taken the image down from its website. LI is run by King Street Patriots lawyer, Kelly Shackleford, the guy who tried to suppress the Alaska Legislature’s Sarah Palin report. Anyway, it turns out that there was a rent house on that vacant lot until 2010. A demolition permit was issued in September, 2009. Tax records indicate the house stood until 2010. The six registered voters mentioned in the attack were renters going back ten years.

If any doubt remains, here’s a Google Earth photo of the house that once stood on King Streets’ allegedly vacant lot.

King Street Patriots doesn’t care, of course, because the truth of an allegation is irrelevant. Like all voter suppression and intimidation campaigns (Greg Mitchell’s account of the the 1934 California gubernatorial race tells a great story about how unfounded accusations of fraud can be used to suppress votes) racist allegations of widespread fraud are used to stir anger among (usually white) conservative voters and intimidate minority voters.

Here’s another example. In their video, King Street Patriots uses a doctored image of an African-American rally-goer holding a sign that reads, “I Only Got to Vote Once.” The sign is lettered in the Comic Sans font and was clearly photo-shopped. Once again we have to ask, if truth and fairness are what they want, why phony-up images? This one actually makes me chuckle for its sheer absurdity. Under what possible circumstances would anyone publicly complain that they only got to vote once?

By the way, there is a national effort to find the young female victim of this particular little fraud. Go to DigitalDupes.org to participate.

The Right wants its suckers to believe that scary people are out there undoing what would otherwise be the natural result of “fair” elections: the absolute hold on power by, well, them.

King Street Patriots appears to be connected to the national right-wing network funded by the notorious Koch brothers. Jane Mayer’s recent piece on them in the New Yorker should be mandatory reading. I think the voter intimidation and suppression campaigns in 2010 will be better funded and more organized than ever before. And I think the best way to discredit them is to expose their lies.

An argument over a lot at 2307 Jackson Street in Houston, Texas, may seem trivial. But it’s not. Caught in a lie, King Street Patriots betrays its true intentions, intentions shared by a national network of anti-democracy forces that will disrupt the 2010 elections any and every way they can.

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In the video, an unidentified spokesman for “TrueTheVote” says, “If we lose Houston, we lose Texas. And guess what? If we lose Texas we lose the country.” The former Mayor of Houston, Democrat Bill White, is running against secessionist Republican Gov. Rick Perry this year. White’s counting on a big turnout in his home town. The fire and the voter suppression campaign guarantee a greatly diminished turnout.

TrueTheVote’s video is well produced. Participants speak in calm and knowing tones, disguising the racist agenda behind their project. We don’t yet know where the group’s money comes from. But they have money.

As I’ve said before, right-wing voter suppression campaigns are the most under-reported political scandal of the last 50-100 years. But there’s never been anything like the criminal destruction of all the voting machines in the nation’s fourth largest city. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect the machines in Houston were destroyed by an arsonist. Warehouses don’t regularly and spontaneously combust at four in the morning, especially warehouses containing all the voting tools in a pivotal city in a pivotal election.

In other details, the suppression campaigns follow a familiar pattern: raise suspicions of widespread voter fraud. Accuse “others” of stealing elections from us (read: white people). Threaten would-be voters with criminal charges. Limit polling locations in poor and minority precincts. Distribute spurious “felon lists” that disenfranchise legal voters who happen to share a name with a felon. Staff phone banks that make election calls to minority and poor voters giving incorrect polling locations and dates. Dress up vigilantes in cop clothes to intimidate would-be voters.

Regular Huffington Post contributor Greg Mitchell wrote one of the best accounts of such a suppression and intimidation campaign in his book about the 1934 California governor’s race, The Campaign of the Century. At least since then, voter suppression has been a part of nearly every election cycle.

There are simply no machines available to replace the loss of Houston’s machines. That means either a return to paper ballots (there may be very few scanners to count them) or a greatly reduced number of polling locations. The latter would require the emergency suspension of state law and run afoul of the Voting Rights Act. In any case, confusion will reign, and confusion reduces turnout.

What about that TrueTheVote statement, “If we lose Houston, we lose Texas. And guess what? If we lose Texas we lose the country.”? That may be the only true thing TrueTheVote has said. For much of the country, Texas is a vast right-wing breeding ground. Actually, Democrats have nearly reached parity in the state House of Representatives. All the elected officials in Dallas are Democrats. Austin, too. Most of the judges and many of the officials in Houston are Democrats.

With a strong turnout in Houston, White could very well beat Perry. Without a national effort to counter the largest voter suppression effort in my memory, that turnout won’t happen. Even if the fire is ruled accidental, its consequences remain the same. If a great number of Houston voters are disenfranchised as a consequence of the fire and the right’s election vigilante effort, democracy loses, and so does the country.

Keep in mind that population shifts will hand Texas several new congressional seats lost in the Democratic rustbelt. This election will decide the players who will draw new lines in redistricting. The stakes are high. The question is, do Democrats have the will to do battle with right-wing forces who believe they can choose who votes and who doesn’t?

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When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise,–and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.

Oh how I wish America had listened. The reality of visible things is in retreat, and in its place we have Glenn Beck, Drudge et al, masters of the art of replacing simplicity and truth with duplicity and falsehood.

It’s no idle worry. When that infamous Bush aide scoffed at the idea of a “reality-based community,” he meant it. Nearly 20 percent of Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim, more, probably, than know what a Muslim is. For many, the villain is not unemployment. The villains are the unemployed. Bush didn’t wreck the economy, Obama did. Health insurance companies aren’t the problem, government is the problem.

Cry, baby, cry, for reality is in retreat, driven back by the power-mad and the impossibly irresponsible. Reality’s assailants do not realize that once they’ve virtualized the earth, they too will float free of its blue assurance, vulnerable to the next big illusion. Gravity needs mass, and right now American politics is massless.

The power to trump reality with unreality has long been fretted over, from Horkheimer and Adorno to Lippmann and Orwell. Jurgen Habermas’ doctoral thesis, “The Transformation of the Public Sphere,” was, in part, a meditation on the political consequences of mass audiences separated from the truth of their lives by the real barbed wire (see image above).

In other words, we knew it was coming. For that matter, we knew it had happened before. And still, and still…

In a recent speech about the importance of truth to democracy, P.J. O’Rourke, no liberal ideologue, said:

Information is the essence of what might be called the “Attitude of Liberty” — the feeling of being free.

People must, of course, feel free of physical and economic oppression. But first they must feel free of ignorance…

…There’s power in the Attitude of Liberty — a sense that one has some knowledge, some understanding, and therefore some control, if only control over one’s own ideas.

The strength of America is not economic, military, or diplomatic. The strength of America is an idea — an idea of a place where people have information, understanding, and control over their lives.

Free of ignorance. But ignorance is precisely what is being promoted by many in the media. They undermine democracy to do little more than sucker us with a carnival barker’s cynical promise that there really is a living, two-headed child in their sideshow tents.

I still remember the time when, as a much-too-innocent cub reporter, a politician lied to me for the first time. He was chairman of a statehouse budget committee, and he lied about some cuts I knew had already been made. “You’re lying,” I said. He smiled. That’s it. He smiled.

But now it’s the lied-to media that’s smiling, lost, I fear, in the seductiveness of Unreality. A journalist subservient to facts is not nearly as celebrity-sexy as a reporter who makes up worlds, a reporter who is more important than truth.

Emerson got this at a time America was just beginning to come to grips with itself. Now we’ve lost our grip, and it may be too late to regain it.

A friend of mine asked me recently, “Can you imagine what they are going to say about us three generations down the road, when they’re all wearing gas masks?” In fact, I can imagine it, and it’s not pretty.

Another friend, Paul Begala, wrote a piece more than 10 years ago about the failures of our generation. I took him to task in print, pointing to some grand achievements and great artists. I’m afraid he was right and I was wrong. We are, collectively, failing, and not because the tasks are too difficult, but because we are too easily seduced.

We’re not the Me Generation. We’re the Knee Generation, and we’re willing to go down for anyone with a dollar and a holler.

I know I’m preaching to the converted here, to those who have remained upright and ready to fight for reality, beauty, truth, justice. But this Requiem for Reality is for everyone in the church. Sleepers, sinners and saints alive, awake.

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Oh my mama told me
‘Cause she say she learned the hard way
She say she wanna spare the children
She say don’t give or sell your soul away
‘Cause all that you have is your soul

So don’t be tempted by the shiny apple
Don’t you eat of a bitter fruit
Hunger only for a taste of justice
Hunger only for a world of truth
‘Cause all that you have is your soul.

The sentiment above, expressed beautifully by singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman, goes to the heart of Americans’ self-image. In this nation, we tell ourselves, we are free to be true to our souls. I guess it all depends upon what you mean by “true” or “soul.”

Like the narrator’s mother in the song, we seem condemned to learn this truth the hard way, if we learn it at all. If the financial meltdown has not taught us anything else, it should teach us that there’s hell to pay when you sell your soul.

Jean Paul Sartre famously described hell as other people. I think, instead, that our soul is other people. Living within a Ayn Randian/Social Darwinist myth of the isolated individual versus the world, we exploit others for our own advantage. It’s our own souls that pay the price. By the way, Sartre always claimed he was misunderstood. He said:

It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us.

I meet people from all walks of life and from all parts of the country who live as if they recognize this simple truth. Our everyday interactions with friends and strangers depend upon it. We give honest change at the bar. We hold doors open for the elderly and the frail (in the South, men still hold them open for women).

Collectively, though, we live by a dim and different light. Others are our competitors in a zero sum game. It’s insane, really. The devilish rich think they can run off with all the money. They shrug off 10 percent unemployment and all the suffering it causes, knowing all the while that it’s caused by their actions. They can’t run away with the money, though, ‘cause there’s nowhere for them to run. That’s Tracy Chapman’s lesson of the bitter fruit. Sartre’s, too.

In his song about a young boy’s friendship with an old oilfield roughneck, Guy Clark sings that they we’re “desperados waiting for a train.” He was on to something there. We live in the Land of the Pinkertons, and it often seems like love and friendship so threaten the Randians among them that those of us looking for a little kindness, love and justice are, of necessity, desperados.

The beautiful thing about Clark’s song is its unpretentious, down-home prairie humanism. The magic of life is in our relationship with others, especially others who never gave up on their souls, fortifying our own. People like the roughneck, who, Clark tells us, was “an old school man of the world” and a “hero of this country.”

The clip above is from an old Letterman broadcast. Singing with Nanci Griffith are Clark, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Rodney Crowell, Eric Taylor, Jerry Jeff Walker and the inimitable Steve Earle. I’ve been privileged to meet most of this gang. Some of ‘em I know pretty well. We ought to elect them all to Congress.

Hungering only for a taste of justice, only for a world of truth, one day we’re gonna elbow one another and say about the train we’ve been waiting on, “Come on Jack that son-of-a-bitch is coming.”

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It’s a rare day that Sarah Palin, the Klondike Queen of Kooks, doesn’t get a front-page turn on Huffington Post. Left, Right, Middle or Ozone, commentators of all stripes are mesmerized by the Right. No matter how nutty, nasty or distant from reality, the extremists talk and the whole political sphere gets all rubbernecked.

I’ve fought white conservatives’ annual voter suppression and intimidation campaigns for decades in the South. It was and is hard to get attention on the issue. But let a couple of black guys dressed up as New Black Panthers hang around an African-American polling place in Philadelphia, and FoxNews has America thinking the Liberty Bell down the street has finally fallen apart.

When CBS News’ Bob Schieffer somehow avoided the Right’s hypnotists on this unscandal and failed to make it a subject on “Face the Nation,” Fox’s Megan Kelly was so shocked she attacked Schieffer on the air. That’s how accustomed the Right is to having its daily way with the minds of America’s newsies and pundit class.

I can’t bring myself to say much about Drudge, except how in the hell is it that college-educated journalists let themselves be drug around by the nose by the idiot? Where is their self-respect? Where is their judgment? Where is their common sense?

It’s not enough to pin the blame on the Right’s legendary message machine, the noisy blog-to-talk-to-Fox-to-talk-to-blog circle of hate. By all rights it ought to be a classic closed system. But there’s something else afoot here, Holmes.

How is it that the Right has mesmerized the American media, including some in the Left-leaning media? Part of the answer lies in the great moral leveling of the media itself. The elimination of authentic moral considerations in reporting reduces everything to mushy he said/she said. Anything goes, so long as it’s entertaining.

Political news has been Jerry Springer-ized. This is an old and very un-Springery observation. It remains relevant. Clowns play better than statesmen in today’s news. Everybody knows it, but few do anything about it. Success comes to those with empty heads, no moral compass, and the gift of self-delusion.

There’s a folk legend that hypnosis can’t make anyone do something they’re opposed to morally. If that is the case, America really is in moral danger. Or, more accurately, America is danger because of its moral vacuity.

Cultural memory is essential to social ethics, and America is losing its memory. The Right is busy re-writing the Constitution, confident that very few Americans know what it is. The extremists have yet to find a way to justify torture, domestic spying, federal intervention in our bedrooms, and government control of women’s bodies while prohibiting federal enforcement of the commerce clause. However poor their reasoning, however fact-free their arguments, the major media continues to afford them the benefit of the doubt.

History and memory. They are key to understanding the Right’s hypnotic power over today’s media. The New York Times has a story today about China’s murderous occupation of Tibet. The parallels with the European conquest of the Americas are striking. Really striking. So striking that they ought to be mentioned. But they are not.

That, I think, is a clue to Right’s mesmeric power. History is assigned to another bureau. It is someone else’s beat. The Right gets this, and it promises journalists what logic tells us is impossible: a place in history that requires the erasure of history.

The person who, like Emerson, wants to pierce the rotten diction that is the lifeblood of destructive fantasy is, well, little more than a drag, a bummer, out of touch with the power of anti-history while looking to the lessons of history for some sign of justice.

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On Frenchmen Street, a two-block circus of music and bars not far from the Quarter, a young street poet bangs away at his spontaneous verse on an old Royal typewriter and recites them for tips. He came to New Orleans from D.C. to work as an ambulance driver. A city hiring freeze left him a lot of time to write. But he’s not panicked. He was, I promise, happy, if in a bluesy kind of way.

I don’t meet many happy people in politics these days. I’m not sure I meet any. In the political arena, panic is everywhere. On the Right, there’s panic about zombie communism. Maybe we should shorten the name of this ultimate straw-bogeyman to zommunism. Anyway, On the Left, there’s panic about undead fascism. Those not panicked about being sold out are panicked about being accused of being sellouts.

One of Austin’s greater slacker rituals used to be the annual North Austin/South Austin tug-o-war called the “Tug of Honor.” A big rope was strung across the Colorado River, and hundreds of beer-drinking partisans lined up on their side of the river, grabbed the rope and tugged. At some point, one side or the other tumbled into the river. Now, we are much too panicked for that sort of revelry. But there’s another point here.

If you’ve ever been on the losing side in a tug-o-war, you know that moment of panic when your team is overpowered, its mutual footing lost. There’s a kind of oh-my-god panic. Somehow, in our current political circumstance, all sides seem to be having such a moment at the same time. The laws of physics hint that that shouldn’t be possible.

I’m not talking about earnest engagement and advocacy, about the moral courage to advance the causes one believes in. Not all political disagreement falls into the panic mode. Still, and don’t panic at this, I think political ideology is usually, if not always, thin and two-dimensional. Our ideological wars beat with dry if frenzied hearts. The point is, some of our humanity is lost when it’s Certainty versus Certainty on the political playing field. We all loose the resources we use to cope with hope and heartache in our everyday lives.

I can almost never remember today the thing that made me panic day before yesterday. That’s not exactly right. It’s better to say I can almost never work myself into a panic today over the thing that panicked me day before yesterday.

Some symptoms of panic: a fear that all is lost when something is lost; an absolute, religious faith in one’s own judgment; the taking of political setbacks personally; repeated lashing out at those who disagree with us; the certainty that the world (or democracy, or America, or something) will not survive if one’s view does not prevail immediately.

Now, I believe democracy is at risk these days. I think America is fast becoming a kind of purple plutocracy. Corporations are persons, legal entities with no accountability. Corporations are the new humans, above the people and beyond the checks and balances. In this there is great danger. (By the way, if corporations are persons, isn’t it fair to describe Big Insurance as psychopathic? Wikipedia says, “Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by an abnormal lack of empathy combined with strongly amoral conduct, masked by an ability to appear outwardly normal.” I rest my case.)

But reason to panic doesn’t mean we should panic. Cable news lives to keep us on the edge of panic. What was once NightLine is now Once-A-Minute Line. Everything is urgent, from the Hollywood fall-from-grace (nothing is less urgent than Mel Gibson), to a traffic pileup. America was panicked into war over Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. I rest another case.

I’m with the street poets of New Orleans, and there’s no such thing as a poem written in panic. Or a good law, either.

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Our friend Rachel Farris, otherwise known as blogger Mean Rachel, visits DogCanyon with a great post. We’re proud to welcome her to the Canyon, and recommend everyone read this, visit her blog regularly. You’ll wanna send her presents.

By Rachel Farris

BP’s wells aren’t the only things failing around Texas these days.

Education is quickly draining out of Texas classrooms, and as the oil spill made its way onto Texas beaches this weekend, word of the brain-drain that is our State Board of Education has most certainly gotten out. The spoof public relations Twitter account for BP, BPGlobalPR, tweeted a Texas-sized zinger that quickly zoomed to the top of Twitter.com today, garnering over 100+ retweets in less than two hours: “Our oil hit Texas beaches yesterday. Fortunately, in 20 years their school books will say nothing happened. #bpcares“.

Tarballs and tainted history. Lucky us.

The Texas State Board of Education has been caught in the national spotlight of mainstream news sources (see How Christian Were the Founders?) ever since, like a smelly oil well in the wind, reporters picked up the scent of how completely whacked-out the current SBOE members are–or, as the New York Times more politely put it, when the SBOE approved a curriculum that “put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks.” Now, thanks to the SBOE’s it’d-be-funny-if-it-weren’t-so-sad antics, BPGlobalPR’s tweet today pushed the long-term risks of a state board rewriting history to perhaps a larger–and younger–following with a taste for schadenfreude.

As far as I can see, the only thing worse than George W. Bush being back in Texas is the state of education here. Bill Hobby, former Lt. Governor of Texas, recently called Texas the “Laughing Stock State” as a result of the SBOE’s desire to remove from the pages of textbooks notable Hispanics like Lorenzo de Zavala, who helped draft the constitution of the Republic of Texas. As if erasing history wasn’t enough, Republican SBOE members like incumbent Ken Mercer want to actually rewrite history by replacing them with ultra-conservatives like Sean Hannity, who once said, “I’ll tell you who should be tortured and killed at Guantanamo: every filthy Democrat in the U.S. Congress.” Where do you think they’ll tuck that quote in the margins of a second grader’s social studies text? In the “Washed Up TV Hosts Who Historically Have Incited Violence” chapter?

Without a change of board members, as Governor Rick Perry continues to inexcusably refer to the BP oil disaster an “act of God,” Texas’s textbooks will soon reflect the same type of Republican ideology that Mercer’s opponent, Democrat Rebecca Bell-Metereau, correctly called “a butchered curriculum…riddled with inaccuracy.”

And with teachers like Rick Perry and Ken Mercer at the helm, why even bother with standardized tests?

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The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man. In the first place, the interviewer is the reverse of an inspiration, because you are afraid of him.

The perils of confronting an interviewer are many, Twain writes.

You close your shell; you put yourself on your guard; you try to be colorless; you try to be crafty, and talk all around a matter without saying anything: and when you see it in print, it makes you sick to see how well you succeeded. All the time, at every new change of question, you are alert to detect what it is the interviewer is driving at now, and circumvent him. Especially if you catch him trying to trick you into saying humorous things.

And, by flitting quickly from subject to subject, the interviewer pulls just enough words from you to be hanged by them.

Now his interruptions, his fashion of diverting you from topic to topic, have in a certain way a very serious effect: they leave you but partly uttered on each topic. Generally, you have got out just enough of your statement to damage you; you never get to the place where you meant to explain and justify your position.

I have interviewed and I have been interviewed. Believe me, it’s better to ask than be asked, which journalists past and present will gladly admit. Ah, the power, the power. The mighty undone and the drop of a pencil on a pad, a raised eyebrow that disconcerts and discombobulates the interview subject….those were the days, my friend, those were the days….

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