



by Ledge Slater, official DP intern stud

Wednesday, August 15th, 2012,

(WASHIGNTON) –Responding Wednesday to another round of inquiries to the Justice Department’s crusade to stop states like Florida requiring voters to produce state-issued identification in order to vote, Attorney General Eric Holder stated to the Senate Judiciary Committee that some ethnic groups in the U.S. were “simply biologically incapable” of obtaining government issued IDs, and declared that requiring all voters provide IDs to vote would be “discriminatory.”

Holder sat before the Committee to explain the Justice Department’s recent increase in agents (over 100) it has assigned to investigate allegations of “voter suppression” in Florida, Pennsylvania and other states. However the Committee got more than it bargained for as Holder stated, “Throughout history minorities and the poor have been prevented from voting by means such as ‘poll taxes’ and literacy tests...and requiring voters to produce government-issued IDs today is in the same vein of those discriminatory practices back then.”

“Let’s be frank,” continued Holder, “much of the anthropological data (the Justice Department) has acquired concludes that people of certain ethnicities are simply biologically incapable of obtaining voter identifications.”

Holders statements were met with stunned silence by Committee members, until after a full minute Rep. Tom Colburn (R-OK) cleared his throat, saying, “Umm, excuse me, sir?”

The Attorney General explained that “non-Westerners” have historically placed little emphasis on people proving who they were through written identification, including when voting. “In Asia, Africa, but especially Latin America,'' declared Holder, ''people have not asked to produce documentation proving who they said they were, even when going to vote…granted the few occasions they were allowed to do so.”

According to Holder, although there is no “physical imperative” to Hispanics and other “ethnicities of color” obtaining government-issued identification [such as when Robocop (1987) attempted to arrest executives of his Omni Consumer Corporation], such requirements would, as Holder put it, “demean the long tradition of trusted, verbal self-identification so common with ‘non-Western cultures’ in the United States, and so would show great disrespect if they were made to produce ‘an official writ’ proving they are who they claim they are.”

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“It’s a simple matter of respect,” proclaimed Holder Wednesday. “Either we can honor the traditions of ethnicities in the U.S. who have no historical cultural demand they prove who they are, or we can take a step back to the days of Jim Crow and force people who have no familiarity with proving who they are to do so in a most uncomfortable setting (voting).”

Added Holder, “After all, this is America; we’re founded on ‘inclusion;’ on making people from other nations and cultures feel comfortable. How else can we achieve that unless we allow Hispan…I mean, uhh, ‘people’ to practice the traditions of the native lands they came from? Anything less would be discriminatory.”

Adjourning from the hearing Wednesday afternoon, ranking committee member Rep. Chuck Grassely (R-IA) said to congressional reporters, “I…I would comment on what the Attorney General said today and how it bodes for the future of preventing voter fraud, but first let me go change my pants….Excuse me.”

Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allar, member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, hailed the Attorney General’s testimony as “long awaited bluntness” and said that if states like Florida, Arizona, New Mexico and Pennsylvania continue demanding their voters prove who they were before voting, it was now a matter of blatant discrimination –certainly nothing any legislature or governor wished to be accused of.

As usual, Duh Progressive’s crack reporters were on the scene to take responses from the Hispanic Caucus’ members. “For years the (Senate) Judiciary Committee has been horsing around, and so has the (Obama) administration on this ‘voter ID’ issue,” said Rep. Roybal-Allard (D-CA). “But now the administration has made it clear: voter suppression by this petty old matter of, oh, ‘who are you-thing’ is being laid to rest and will no longer be tolerated by the federal government.”

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Florida Governor Rick Scott reacted to Holder’s statements Wednesday, saying, “Up till now I thought the issue of purging our lists of ineligible voters was a matter of election integirty; of securing honesty in a democratic system. …But when told we were racist by denying people of certain backgrounds to prove who they were at the (voting) booths…well, what can I say..? On behalf of all Floridians, I’m sorry. I didn’t know we were acting so insensitively.”

Laurie Burgess, PhD, Associate Chair of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C., agrees with the Attorney General’s reasoning, pointing to historical evidence that written proof for one’s identity was a phenomenon mainly contained to Europe and some of North Africa. Heading to the bowels of the Smithsonian Institute Wednesday, Dr. Burgess unveiled an ancient and rare 54-pound rock slab with a face and writing on it. Burgess said it was a 40,000-year-old “voters license,” recovered from ancient caves in Chauvet, France in 1979. “See, this is proof,” said Dr. Burgess to Duh Progressive Wednesday. “This is proof that Caucasians valued voter identification long before it became ‘normal’…by Western standards, anyway.”

According to Burgess, ancient Europeans used to carry such heaving slabs with them when they went to do anything necessitating “identity verification,” such as trusting others to insure the safety of their prized possession of rocks (ancient bank accounts), or to join a convoy traveling along dangerous roads (latter-day mass tansit systems, such as airlines), and cross borders into other tribes (immigration) to prove who they were, where they were from, and provide “invasive information,” according to Dr. Burgess, on where they planned to live and do once in the other tribes’ territory.

“There’s no doubt about it,” said Burgess Wednesday, “Europeans were as adamant on discriminating against people by demanding they prove ‘who they actually were’ then as they are now. If we have only one thing to learn from this ancient and horrid slab, it is that no one should be questioned on who they really are under any circumstance.”

Added Burgess, “As heavy as these rocks people had to carry with them thousands of years ago were, so is equally heavy the burden of people today who are of cultures that never had to identify themselves officially; where they could just go and do anything under any identity they wanted, yet are forced to do so.”

“ …Who are we from day-to-day, anyway..?” added Burgess, “Today I may be Doctor Laurie Burgess, but tomorrow I may feel like Tiger Woods…while in a voting booth. I’m just happy we’re living in an age where proving who you are to authorities is no longer necessary. ‘Tis a truly great age, indeed.”





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