Fred Barnes: early voters "poor, old"

Fred Barnes on FNC was a riot yesterday - he actually despises "early voting." Like that's such a bad thing - giving people more than 12 hours to vote - what a concept. It's little wonder that Republicans have openly and in most cases vehemently protested early voting in the 30+ states that have it. Why?

According to Barnes, "because voters might miss something." Oh really? Reading between the lines there, what they might miss are the last-minute, desperate attempts by the GOP and McCain to slime Obama with just about anything they can dig up, no matter how untimely or irrelevant it might be.

In the past week, we've seen or heard just about everything the right and McCain have been storing up for last-minute use - Bill Ayers, the "socialist" label, Jeremiah Wright (more on that in a minute), scaring people about his tax proposals, labeling him an anti-Semite, and on and on.

That, my friends (I hope we never, EVER have to hear that annoying phrase after McCain hopefully gets his butt whipped tomorrow) is why the GOP opposes early voting.

We absolutely, positively need to change how we elect our politicians after this election. It's tragic and appalling that immediately after a presidential election, we seem to forget just how broken the system is, until 3½ years later, when we all whine (myself included): "How can our election system be so screwed up?!?"

Oh, and Barnes' categorizing early voters as "poor, old people" is nothing more than breathtakingly ignorant, period.