Vadum, Voting, And (Of Course) The Trib

From Talkingpointsmemo yesterday we read Matthew Vadum's views on registering welfare recipients to vote:

Conservative columnist Matthew Vadum is just going to come right out and say it: registering the poor to vote is un-American and "like handing out burglary tools to criminals."

Then there's this from Brian Hasen at Electionlawblog:

Deny the right to vote the poor because they might vote in their self-interest. I don’t know something more “un-American” these days than claiming that wealth should be a valid criterion for deciding who should get the right to vote.

It's all about this piece in the American Thinker.

Before we get any further, let's start with Matthew Vadum's clarification. In responding to Hasen, Vadum writes:

I never made that argument but Hasen is either too stupid to understand this or he is deliberately sliming me. Of course those who are legally qualified to vote should be allowed to vote but our tax dollars shouldn't be used to underwrite the destruction of the republic.

Vadum's first part is, oddly enough, he doesn't explicitly make that particular argument. But what does he say?

Here's Vadum's opening:

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?

Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.

Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

See? It's not about denying "them" the vote - it's about not registering "them" in the first place!

World of difference there.

But haven't we seen Matthew Vadum before?

Why yes. Yes we have - in the Trib, of course.

• Here's a hit piece on George Soros.
• Here's an editorial that cites Vadum's "work" on ACORN.
• Here's another.

Each time he's tagged as a "Senior Editor" at the Capital Research Center. The center itself is beneficiary of about $4.9 million of Scaife Foundation money over the years.

So Vadum doesn't want the poor to register to vote because he thinks that they'll vote in their own economic self-interest and doing so is, in his words, "un-American".

Does he think it's any different for the rich?