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You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Racial Justice / Post-racial America / Jigger what, jigger who

Jigger what, jigger who

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I just can’t think of what all these areas have in common (via):

Kirk’s campaign confirmed the candidate was secretly taped last week as he was talking about his anti-voter fraud effort.

“These are lawyers and other people that will be deployed in key, vulnerable precincts, for example, South and West sides of Chicago, Rockford, Metro East, where the other side might be tempted to jigger the numbers somewhat,” he said in the audio posted on YouTube.

Another principled conservative advocate of orderly voting, I guess.

Reader Interactions

44Comments

  1. 1.

    Xecky Gilchrist

    I just can’t think of what these areas all have in common

    Jigger, huh.

    Stopped juuuuuuust short of it, didn’t he.

  2. 2.

    General Stuck

    I swear, if a wingnut tries to challenge me or anyone in line as a matter of slowing things down to discourage people waiting in line, I am going Rahmbo and ‘jigger” his/her ass, one side and up the other. I saw it happen in 2004, but not to me. And didn’t know what was going on. Wonder what the bail is for jiggering wingnuts?

  3. 3.

    Nutella

    I was pretty sure I was going to vote for the weak Democrat rather than this Kirk guy. Now I’m very sure.

    In other news, Rahm Emanuel was first in line for the early voting that started on Monday but he can’t legally run for mayor. You will note in the linked article that, to the elections commission, legality is always trumped by loud assertions from the candidates so Rahm will run anyway. You’d think a guy with so much money and ambition would have kept a small apartment in the city to claim as his residence while he was living in DC but I guess laws are for the little people, like taxes.

  4. 4.

    Steve

    I watched a local news report on the issue. I couldn’t believe that the guy is talking about sending “voter integrity squads” into African-American districts, and yet the story focused not on that but on the oh-so-important question of whether “jigger” is a racially-charged word. The media really sucks, I thought to myself.

    But then looking around the blogs, the vast majority of the comments focus on exactly that issue! No wonder liberals lose. Let’s get distracted by a stupid argument over whether “jigger” is a taboo word, instead of talking about genuine Republican vote suppression tactics.

  8. 8.

    Steve

    @Nutella: It is difficult to tell whether the arguments about Rahm’s eligibility are legit. They sound plausible, but the “experts” quoted in these articles are on the payroll of Rahm’s opponents, so they’re not exactly objective sources. Time will tell.

  12. 12.

    DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.

    @Steve:

    I didn’t mean to focus on the word “jigger” but you know I like song titles for post titles. My point was that these are all areas with large African-American populations.

  13. 13.

    El Cid

    Look, he’s just tired of all these jiggers messing up elections. Jigger here, jigger there, it’s been hell since they’ve integrated the jiggers into the voting system. As George Wallace once declared, ‘no other son-of-a-bitch will ever out-jigger me again.’

  16. 16.

    Martin

    Ouch. Whitman was just asked in the debate by Dan Rather how she expects businesses to find illegal workers when she couldn’t find one in her own home.

  17. 17.

    Nutella

    @Steve:

    Residency laws never fit real life. I once was legally required by Michigan to have a Michigan drivers license, by Illinois to have an Illinois drivers license, and by all 50 states and the feds to have no more than one drivers license. Fortunately I didn’t have any traffic stops during that time.

  19. 19.

    Xecky Gilchrist

    Steve – we’re well aware of the real problem.

    Are you the same Steve I piefiltered over at Sadly, No!?

  22. 22.

    Martin

    @Steve:

    But perhaps I’ve said too much.

    You have any Nicaraguan passports? Oh, and I could use a Ukranian birth certificate, if you also handle that sort of thing.

  23. 23.

    kommrade reproductive vigor

    Dear Republicans,

    We’re allowed to vote now. Get over it and get out of the way.

    Sincerely,

    The Brown People of America

    These are lawyers and other people

    I wonder about the other people in this statement. James O’Keefe in black face with a camera hidden in his pimp hat perhaps?

  29. 29.

    shortstop

    You’d think a guy with so much money and ambition would have kept a small apartment in the city to claim as his residence while he was living in DC but I guess laws are for the little people, like taxes.

    I’m trying to figure out where his wife and kids, who stayed in Chicago rather than move permanently with him to Washington, are living, then. The kids go to a school a few blocks from here (and I am well within the city, nowhere near any city limit). Did they move to the north shore and the kids just kept their old school or something? That’d be a serious commute.

  30. 30.

    shortstop

    (Look, my family’s from the South. We don’t speak English like the rest of ya’ll.)

    It’s y’all, baby, not ya’ll. Yes, I know it’s often mispunctuated, but it’s a contraction of “you” and “all,” so the apostrophe correctly goes one door to the left.

  31. 31.

    maus

    @Steve: Well yeah, this is as much of an issue as “niggardly”, but thankfully the argument isn’t solely about “jigger”.

  32. 32.

    Mnemosyne

    @kommrade reproductive vigor:

    I’ve always heard it as re–jigger, like someone would re–jigger the numbers to make them work after the fact. Which, again, I suspect comes from cocktail-making — the first one you mixed didn’t work, so you re-jigger it.

    The weird part is that I am originally from Illinois, so I don’t know where Kirk came up with this “jigger” stuff.

    (Edited because FYWP doesn’t know how to handle a goddamned hyphen.)

  33. 33.

    shortstop

    A number of entries on Urban Dictionary inform me that a jigger is a black Jew. I’m pretty sure there aren’t large numbers of these in Illinois, but the ones who are here seem unlikely to have Kirk signs in their windows.

  34. 34.

    Nutella

    @shortstop:

    The Emanuels rented their house to someone else. They used to have a commuter marriage (when he was a congressman) but all of them moved to DC when he went to work for the administration.

  37. 37.

    NobodySpecial

    I think I’d like to see one of these characters in action, if only so I could go to them, play ‘walk-along’ with them to the parking lot, and then threaten them with major bodily harm, because here in Rockford, they don’t have lots of cops available to watch the polling places.

  38. 38.

    satby

    Mark Kirk knows a bit about fraud, since he went for years claiming military awards he didn’t get.
    But the capper on this story is how “offended” Mr. Kirk is that black voters are “offended” by his implication that he might be a racist and have used a racial term. Yeah, “jigger” means fiddle around with, but I was thinking he stopped just short of saying jigaboo too. And I’m South Side Irish, so I can hear dog whistles as well as the dogs.

  39. 39.

    YellowDog

    I guess Kirk decided that pig Latin was too sophisticated a code for that audience. (“We have to uppress-say the ote-vay by the …”) In the process, he may have coined a Republican neologism.

  40. 40.

    MattMinus

    @Mnemosyne:

    Cocktails are obviously racist. All words inherit meaning from other words that rhyme with them.

    Any mention of the moon is also deeply hurtful to African-Americans.

  41. 41.

    shortstop

    @Nutella: That happened fairly recently, then. During the first year of the Obama administration, the kids were still going to school here.

  42. 42.

    Ed Marshall

    Mark Kirk is welcome to send poll watchers anywhere he wants but good luck finding a Republican who will go to the west side of Rockford. I know these people and they will park their cars on the east side of the river and walk a quarter mile to get to the metrocentre to see the Toby Keith show. They all believe they will instantly die if they get on the jigger side of town go to the west side.

  43. 43.

    Woodrowfan

    I’ve heard the word “jigger” many times, as to “tinker with” or “foll with.” I don’t think that was the dog-whistle.

  44. 44.

    Sebastian Dangerfield

    @Suck It Up!: @Mnemosyne:

    Think he was mixing his epithets up: He was afraid “they” might be jigger-rigging the vote.

    Man, more than his Freudian slip is showing. I’d say his girdle’s hanging out as well.

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