"Naaah...You Ain't Got The EJICASHUN to Vote!"

And then, something really odd happened, mostly because I think that we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country. People who could not even spell the word "vote," or say it in English, put a committed socialist idealogue in the White House, name is Barack Hussein Obama. Tom Tancredo,speaking yesterday at the first Tea Party National Convention

How was Barack Obama, our first black president, elected?

It was the lack of literacy tests says former Republican representative Tom Tancredo, to hoots and cheers from his audience of Tea Partiers.

Of course, anyone familiar with the history of civil rights in this country knows that literacy tests were for years used in the American south to prevent black voters from voting. So, either Tancredo and his audience are unaware of this and therefore have no business denigrating other Americans for lack of education -- or they are aware of this, and consider the voting policies of the Jim Crow south something to emulate.

This nostalgia for the days before the 1965 Voting Rights Act is especially interesting given that we’re seeing, at the same time, a systematic effort at historical revisionism coming from the right (via Jonah Goldberg) in which famously racist movements like the Nazis and the Klan are depicted as the products of liberalism.