According to this site, the consortium of news media that were responsible for recounting the disputed Florida ballots from last November’s elections have discovered that Gore won by a substantial victory – and have conveniently decided to bury the news in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
There’s a fair number of cites, but no real names or numbers, and the author blames the coverup on big-money interests who want Bush in power to protect their own assets.
Comments? Criticisms? Random speculation? Or should we talk about whether the Republicans are breaking the spirit of bipartisanship by balking at the idea of federal support for increased security at airports?
Any story, that uses a phrase like “Democracy was raped in 2000.” loses a certain amount of credibility with me to begin with… (rape is NOT a cool metaphor in politics, kids…and seems insulting to those citizens who HAVE been sexually assaulted)
When the author then Godwinizes his thesis with this gem
" What is never explored is the question of whether Bush is more legitimate than Adolf Hitler, who also ascended to power by pulling a fast one after losing the popular vote"
It’s hard to ascribe ANY serious credibility to the bit.
And the cake topper is
"If George W. Bush announces that he is canceling the 2004 presidential election, then who will stop him? "
Shows a real lack of understanding of the constitution.
There are legitimate articles about the nature of the election of 2000…this ain’t one of them.
I’m still really, really sad about what happened in Florida and in the election overall.
However, this “consortium” and the results they found from their recounts don’t hold any legal standing, so the truth is, it really isn’t news. There were a lot of us who knew that truth all along. We knew he legitimately won and that would have been proven out had proper, legal recounts been allowed at the time. But unfortunately the law - or certain people’s interpretation of it - worked against Mr. Gore, his supporters and those who voted for him in the State of Florida.
It’s over now. There’s nothing we can do about it legally, so beating this dead horse only leads to more and more frustration and anger.
My country is at war. We’re being portrayed throughout Muslim countries as an evil empire that needs to be brought down to our knees and these religious zealots are willing to die themselves to make that happen. I’m scared - scared of what threats they’re capable of following up on and scared that they will actually do it. The future of the entire Middle East, how it’s divided, who rules where and other pressing concerns are hanging in the balance right now. Frankly, I have much more important things on my mind than hanging chads.
So, no, I really don’t care if they’re making this non-story exactly what it is - 25th page old news.
I really appreciate your consideration in avoiding stepping on my penis - Spiny Norman
Jeg elsker dig, Thomas
Papers were presented at the Joint Statistical Meetings back in early August that resolved this issue pretty solidly, IMO. The press didn’t cover the JSM, but that isn’t anything new, and certainly didn’t have anything to do with the terrorist attack that wouldn’t occur for another five weeks.
Even if the statistical evidence presented at the JSM became front-page news, it would hardly ‘create major trouble’ for the Bush presidency. Right or wrong, the fact remains that he’s the guy in the White House, and nothing will change that until January 2005, at the earliest.
Ask around. I supported Gore. I argued all over the place here about the vote. I believe (and believed at the time, too), that this eventually would be the story. And believed at the time that it would be a ‘big deal’ when it came out.
ya know what? Things have changed. It will not do any good at this point to rehash the warmed over, rehased, chopped up leftover rehasing hash browns. It really won’t. and for the record, I now don’t care that my sister decorated our bedroom with plastic decalled daisys and white lace curtains, either.
(However, I still haven’t forgiven Kevin R for hitting me in the head with a brick when I was 6. I’ll keep you posted)
Want to talk about something that isn’t moot? Discuss what procedures should be in place prior to November 2004 to prevent a repeat, in any state, of what happened in Florida.
My thought: I would rather have a machine with no political affiliation counting votes than anyone - neutral as they may claim to be - interpreting the “intent of the voter.”
For god’s sake. No names, no cites, no numbers. I’d be as happy as the next person if the recount resulted in a “decisive” victory for Gore, but this article makes the “Clinton had people killed” videotapes seem logical and well-supported.
Next down the same page is a crude satire of an Ann Coulter column (yes, one can tell the difference) presented in exactly the same way. Add to that the lack of citations, even ignoring the boilerplate, and this is clearly crap. A shame, too - there is so much solid, reasonable material to work with to make a more credible point.
But the consortium results won’t change the results, even if true, and still wouldn’t represent the result that would have happened if the count had been done according to the law as it had always stood until Bush’s court-assisted stalling after Election Day. That legal result is now undeterminable and will always be.
The only effect an announcement of the consortium’s results could have, one that may be occurring anyway as the ideologues running the White House encounter reality, is a softening and moderation of policies Bush is supporting. It would be nice if he and they had understood from the first that the people had chosen a moderate course, not a scorched-earth right-wing course - we’d be in a lot less trouble today.
Oh, heck, after there were several previous, post-election recounts that showed Bush having more votes, they FINALLY claim to have found one that indicates otherwise? Yeesh. Forgive me if I don’t take them seriously.
What exactly is your point, rjung? Should we stop everything and hold another recount? I’m not sure what you are getting at - are you saying that real news has been hidden, or that we need to re-think who the president should be?
I strongly question that conclusion anyway. I’ve been following the recount efforts, and NO ONE has suggested that the outcome was ‘clear’ or ‘decisive’. In fact, the current state of the recount suggests that Gore MIGHT have won, but not using his own strategy. It turns out that trying to limit the recounts the way he did was a bad strategic move, because he lost more votes in the Republican districts than Bush did.
Then there is the practical aspect, which is that after 8 months of recounts, the victor still isn’t clear. So whatever the ‘final’ tally turns out to be, it’s irrelevant because the country would not have gone 8 months without a President. So some method would have had to have been put in place to choose a President. EVERY single constitutional method would have favored Bush anyway. There was simply no way for Gore to win.
The real truth in that election is that it was a tie. The difference in votes between the two of them was so small that it was within the margin of error of the electoral counting process. Fortunately for Bush, he happened to be leading on paper by a small margin. So he’s the man. No one ‘stole’ the election. Or if you think so, please make the case for how Gore’s victory would have been any more legitimate if some recount had swung 500 votes and put him into the lead by an insignificant amount, rather than Bush being in the lead by an insignificant amount.
The first media-recounts after the election, BTW, were to simply finish the job that the Supreme Court stopped, which is what Gore wanted. And those recounts showed Bush still winning.
If the entire state had been recounted, Gore might have come out on top (and I believe that’s the recount we are still waiting for), but here’s the kicker: Gore never asked for that!. The recounts that did what he WANTED done, would have resulted in Bush winning.
Well, SPOOFE, if ya want to refight Florida, I’m your man. Putting such a biased spin on where things left off is red meat to a guy like me who is still pissed about Florida, and knows what was counted, and what wasn’t.
But I don’t think you really want to re-argue this one. Trust me on this, OK? :rolleyes:
Well, like I said, the press didn’t cover the Joint Statistical Meetings in Atlanta back in August.
So make that ‘no one you’ve heard of’.
Y’know, I could’ve started a helluva good thread after I got back from Atlanta, but I figured everyone was tired of Election 2000. Now it looks like I’m going to have to dig out some cites. But in the morning. It’s been a long day.
Maybe no person stole the election, but the fact remains that Gore was swindled out of it anyway.
Fuck the recounts; it’s what the recounts didn’t count. If a ballot swindles you out of several thousand votes, and the law only allows you to argue over comparatively trivial amounts, it’s a swindle even still.
RT, my friend, the first thing I’m gonna be doing when I get up tomorrow morning is looking for your posts to this thread. Because I read the articles, and they sounded pretty believable to me.
Cuz you KNOW the bumper sticker I’m getting for 2004: RE-Elect Gore. (And I like to believe that he will be a better president then than he would have been now. I hope and believe he will have learned his lessons from the last time.)
I feel sorry for people like you. You’re like the guy who got stood up at prom and now hates all women cause you didn’t get the obligatory piece of nookie that you had built up in your mind as the end-all-be-all of your pithetic existence.
Christ even the Gore people are glad Bush is President:
RTFirefly: Why keep us in suspense? What was the conclusion at the Joint Statistical Meeting? And what was the reasoning?
BTW, to credibly make the claim that Bush ‘stole’ the election, you have to show that he or his operatives took actions which interfered with the normal constitutional process, and without taking those actions Gore would have been elected. I know of no evidence whatsoever to support that conclusion. Several media recounts immediately after the election showed that had the Supreme Court not interfered in the recounts and allowed them to take place in exactly the fashion that Gore wanted, he would still have lost.
BTW, if we had some kind of magic mirror that allowed us to divine the ‘intent’ of the voters, I have NO DOUBT that Al Gore would be president. The ‘Butterfly Ballot’ was a horrible design, and certainly cost Gore several thousand votes. But that isn’t Bush’s fault, and there was no constitutional remedy to that problem. You can’t even make the case that it was Republican dirty tricksterism, because the person who designed it was a Democrat (btw, I wrote an internal article for my company which described how flawed that ballot was, and how it cost Gore thousands of votes. I’m the head of our User Interface Design Team, and it made a great example of a really BAD user interface).
