HE HAS A LITTLE LIST...

IT LOOKS AND FEELS LIKE RAIN

SUNRISE IN THE PINES

Friday, 8:00 AM.  Wind WNW, moderately gusty.  The sky is partly cloudy with a lot of haze.  The humidity is 69% and the barometer is steady, now standing at 29.92"  It looks and feels like rain, which would be good, except that I want to get the garden raked.
   The neighborhood has been very quiet, as a number of folks have retreated to warmer climes. The snowbirds should be back pretty soon though, or they will miss the thousands of daffodils that bedeck our town every spring.
  Gee, the President thinks it would be a great idea if voting were mandatory in the United States.  I guess he would enforce that dictate with a fine if one didn't go to the polls.  A kind of  reverse-poll tax.  Remember the infamous poll taxes of the Old South, a fee people paid in order to cast their ballot?  This would be a fee that you paid if you didn't.  The poor people people of color and the "white trash" who used to skip voting because of the poll tax would now have to pay a poll tax if they didn't vote.  Kind of stands this old world on its head, doesn't it?
   Well, mandatory voting might boost the number of people who vote and it might not.  I think the President figures "rich white people"(do you know any?)  who didn't bother to vote would pay their fine, but the poor of all shades would go to the polls, making the march towards socialism that much easier.
   This scheme actually fits in with the President's concept of democracy, since he considers himself the voice all those who didn't vote, and whom he claims as his followers.  That certainly does give a new dimension to the time honored meaning of the word "democracy," as well as to the word "Orwellian."
   If now our society is ruled by those who bother to be informed enough and go to trouble enough to vote, I suppose there is an off-hand chance that it might be improved by being ruled by the drunks, air-heads, crack-heads and whatever-other-heads are out there that don't bother to vote (of course there are those honorable folks that they don't vote because they are uninformed).
   But even that is not at the bottom of the plan, which is, of course, that the people who now don't bother to vote will be controlled by those who know best; who are, of course, President Obama and his friends. " Just go and cast your vote for us, you don't have to worry your poor little heads about any of it. " The Communists call that "the dictatorship of the proletariat," the dictatorship of the simple fools by their masters.  Ah, what a paradise that will lead to.
   But what if a fine doesn't get the drunks off the bar stools, the pot smokers off the couch, the crack-heads out of the till and the air-heads out of the coffee houses to vote?  What then?
   Folks, you can bet your bottom dollar, if you still have one, that the panacea will be to give people a tax credit for casting their mandatory ballot, yet another freebie.  Or maybe a fiver at the voting both.  Or how about a pack of cigarettes? The latter has always worked well.
   Wow, what a democracy!  Stalin, Mao, Chavez and Kim Jon Il would have embraced it, maybe even Hitler, if everyone would wear a brown shirt when voting.  The system is perfect.  Every one participates, so no one can complain about the outcome.  Or about the gulags or the re-education camps or the gas chambers.  All for one and one for all, right down to the last potato in the pot and the last bullet in the clip.
   There is only one flaw in the President's idea of a mandatory vote.  It still doesn't identify who voted for whom or for what.  That is the final step.  So the Lord High Executioner can make up his list.
  "I have a little list, I have a little list.  And none of them will be missed, none of them will be missed."