“Who wins in an election, is not determined by the people who voted, but by the people who count the votes.”
-Josef Stalin 1939What exactly is the great debate here? Are we debating if Stalin actually said that?
Yeah, I distinctly recall the TV cameras and opposition observers who crowded the Kremlin during that vote count.
Your obvious intention to equate the vote counting in Florida with the fraud inherent in a one party dictatorship is not only assanine but also shows you to be totally ignorant of the American electoral process. Your comment is as dispicable as those made by people who would equate the GOP with Nazis.
I don’t think we can compare America to Stalinist Russia just yet!
Of course America isn’t like Stalinist Russia. We prevent that sort of tyranny by having both parties together be “the people who count the votes”.
Of course, this also helps keep those riff-raff third parties out of it. 
I’ll bet you dollars to donut-holes that the people who complain the most about the current recount process are the ones who want G.W. Bush to be elected.
Interesting that my motivations could be gleaned from just a simple quote. All along I thought I was passing along an interesting truism from an ironic source.
Perhaps we might consider the truth or lack thereof of the quote. Certainly interesting in light of recent circumstances.
Yes, fraud happens. All of the time. The idea is supposed to be that one side’s fraud cancels out the other side’s.
Now, in Fla, the Republicans might maybe be on the losing side of this quote. But what amazes me here (despite the fact that, for purely Machiavellian reasons, I want the Shrub to win, especially since he’s shown his true colors by lambasting the Fla Supremes as soon as they went against him; to know him is to realize how empty of morals, brains, and common sense he is) is that no one has noted how amazingly, stupendously dumb Jim Baker & Co were for not asking for hand recounts of their own when they had the chance. Everything they’ve done since then has had the appearance of them trying some kind of desperate measure to make up for their amazing mistake.
Fortunately, Dubya looks like he’ll pull through anyway. I certainly hope so, since it’ll guarantee we’ll have the last Republican president for at least a generation.
pantom why do some democrats have such a skewed perspective? Gore and Bush are identical, identical. In almost every respect
Though what stalin wasen’t suggesting was fraud but simply making the legalities favor one party over another. (hand recounts switching a Bush win to a Gore win would be totally in line with this quote) However the problem is this election is the exception rather than the rule.
IMHO, the reason this quote is trotted out is in response to the taunting use of Dubya’s “Gore trusts the government, I trust the people” (note: may not be exact) sound bite. Dems portray the Bush quote as hypocritical in light of the GOP’s opposition to hand recounts, and the Repub response is to give the Stalin quote so as to say “its not the voters we don’t trust, it’s the vote counters.”
Depends – is president-elect-wannabe George W. Bush going to name cousin John Ellis (who prompted Fox News to call the election for Bush prematurely) to the role of Media Secretary?
Control the ballots, control the media…
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Asmodean: sorry no response before this, but this thread had dropped to the bottom of the screen and so when I looked after the holiday I completely forgot about it.
My main beef with Bush is the death penalty. Just for a little perspective, after WWII in Europe the death penalty was slowly outlawed in most free countries. It was the same way here for awhile, but then of course the Supreme Court repealed that, and it was off to the electric chair again.
Now, most states have come to realize that the irreversibility of the death verdict means you’re inevitably going to find some people were innocent after they’re dead, and then there’s nothing you can do about it.
Not Texas. Bush has never given out a pardon, ever. More than 100 people have been executed.
I find this utterly reprehensible. Gore is of course, a waffler on this as he is on so many things. But I’d rather have a Machiavellian chameleon (try saying that three times fast) than someone who has shown, publicly for all to see, that he has no qualms at all about giving out the ultimate penalty. He doesn’t even appear to give it a thought.
But then we already know about his brain power, such as it is…
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