Purple haze

Republican secretary of state nominee Beth Chapman didn't just offer $10,000 to anyone who proves voter fraud during next month's primaries. As today's (Mobile) Press-Register reveals, she also unveiled the plan "in a made-for-TV news conference, complete with Chapman and a group of Hale County voters raising purple index fingers, a la Iraq, in support of honest elections."

Of course, Hale County wasn't ruled by a dictator for decades, and it doesn't have foreign armies on its soil, and it isn't beset by daily insurgent attacks, and it isn't in danger of slipping into civil war or theocracy, and the purple fingers were symbols not of clean elections but of democracy coming to people who had little to no experience with making their own governmental decisions thanks to a lifetime of autocratic rule.

But yeah, the Iraq thing probably still makes sense.