Well, being a fair-minded person, I decided to spring for the Bugliosi book you folks have recommended.
I have come away extremely disappointed.
What I will say for Bugliosi is that vis a vis the Supreme Court decision, he makes what might be a good point. His contention is that, regarding the fourteenth amendment issue that they based their ruling on, the four precendents they cited are irrelevant, and he offers four others that he deems more relevant in the opposite way. Mindful of the admonitions he offers in the book itself, though, I intend on looking at those cases first-hand before deciding whether this is a mere difference of opinion or, as he contends, something so clearly incorrect that the only way the Court could have written it is pure partisanship.
In addition, I am curious as to why, as he points out, the Justices would limit their decision to the immediate case rather than allow it to be used as precedent if this is truly a 14th amendment issue.
However, the rest of the book is utter crap.
I knew it was trouble from the minute I saw that it had an introduction by Molly Ivins, probably the deepest Bush-hater in the world. In his own introduction, he states his loathing for the right wing of the Republican Party, and his invective strives to live up to that standard. He spends much time moaning about Gore votes theoretically lost to the butterfly ballot, a problem that was caused by no Republican, and for which there is no reasonable solution. Other than the brief point that he makes which I mentioned above, he salts the book with irrelevancies (In “Amplification 17”, for example, he expresses his admiration for former President George H. W. Bush, either to make clear that he isn’t a knee-jerk Republican hater, or to contrast him to his cretinous son. What this has to do with the Bush v. Gore decision I don’t know, but it is ironic that this man who he paints as one of the most qualified presidents we ever had nominated Clarence Thomas, the Justice for which Bugliosi clearly has the least respect.) and misdirections (“Amplification 9” indicts Chief Justice Rehnquist of perjury, and then chides Rehnquist for presiding over Clinton’s impeachment trial on the same charge…despite the fact that Rehnquist’s role in Clinton’s impeachment, as per the Constitution, was keeping order at the trial, not voting either to accuse or convict). He engages in inflammatory hyperbole (e.g., saying the Justices, in issuing a partisan ruling, stole fifty million Americans’ votes, when in truth, the Justices at worst did that to no more than 2 1-2 million, and even that’s arguable), name-calling (Tom Delay is referred to as a “thug”, Katherine Harris is a “lightweight” - and that, based on her excessive use of makeup and jewelry!) and bait-and-switch tactics (“Amplification 14” makes the point that the Supreme Court is fallible based on his own analysis of the unanimous ruling against Clinton in his attempt to delay Paula Jones’s lawsuit - what, Vince, were they criminally partisan or merely mistaken?). He refers to the Jusices as “unelected” and as “merely lawyers who’ve been given robes”, both statements which, though true to a degree, ignore the democratic processes that take place in the seating of a justice on the high court - his/her nomination by an elected president, and his/her confirmation by an elected Senate. His third section, the recap of the whole mess leading up to the Bush v Gore decision, is extremely selective in the sources he cites; for example, he claims to have heard of no “non-votes” being “thrown to Gore” and that it is impossible based on the security arrangements in Palm Beach County, but I, for one, definitely recall reading of vote counters who consistently placed every questionable ballot in the Gore pile, only to be caught at it by the Republican observers. He notes the unlikelihood of Katherine Harris’s being in her office at 5:00 PM on Sunday to accept recount results (and therefore she should have had the decency to stay away until Monday morning at 9:00 AM) while ignoring the fact that the Florida Supreme Cort explicitly mentioned 5:00 PM Sunday as the proper legal deadline (having thus resolved the contradictions in the Florida vote-counting statutes).
He’s a great trial lawyer, and the trial lawyer jury-convincing tactics are very much on display in this book. And I won’t deny that it’s possible he has a cogent point or two, as I mentioned earlier. However, he is so blatantly biased against Bush that it’s clear that he never objectively considered both sides of the issue as possibilities. The book leaves a very bad taste in my mouth (vitriol, I’m guessing), and I’l be darned if I accept it to be a clinical legal analysis of the Bush v Gore Supreme Court decision.
Chaim Mattis Keller