I do believe that thousands of black voters were deliberately disenfranchized via the “felon list” provided by a private company.
At first, I assumed that the Palm Beach ballot fiasco was a genuine mistake, but I’ve come to wonder if it really was. Could such a poorly designed ballot really be just dumbness and/or bad judgement?
If FL had come up with a legitimate way to remove from the rolls only people who actually had FL felony convictions (and not people with misdemeanor convictions, and not people whose names were similar to people on the list), OR
If West Palm Beach had not switched to the weird ballot that decieved so many people into unintentially voting for Buchanan, OR
If they had done a complete recount of the whole state*,
Gore would have won FL, and therefore the election.
It isn’t just that Gore won the popular vote, although any system that allows the guy who got the 2nd highest number of votes to be the winner is, IMO, seriously flawed. It’s that Bush was not the legitimate victor in Florida. He’s in the White House today because (a) Florida screwed up their election, and (b) a Supreme Court majority managed to come up with a convoluted, “doesn’t apply to any other case” decision that gave victory to the guy they preferred.
*You may remember that a news media group did their own recount and, months after the election, announced the results. The results were that if FL had completed a recount of only those districts that Gore asked to be recounted, Bush would have won, but that if a complete recount of the whole State had been done, Gore would have won. This result was widely reported as “Bush won” or “Bush would have won anyway, even if they’d comleted the recount” (the recount that was stopped). To me, the important point, the point the headlines obscured, is that Gore was the actual winner. Bush is the actual President (the Supreme Court declared him the winner, he was sworn in, he occupies the White House) – but he should’t be.
ElvisL1ves, are you postulating that 9/11 might not have even happened had Al managed to lawyer his way into a win in the last electioon?
I think the “minimal threat” disinformation has beem addressed. But what are “coercive sanctions” above and beyond what were already ineffectually in place?
Hazel, a quick read to bring you up to speed on how it came to pass that Dub won the election. Also, see tilly’s post above.
So, it seems from what I’ve seen so far in this thread that Gore might have been a bit more proactive than Clinton, who seemed happy to leave it with a no-fly zone bombardment regime and no inspections - let successor (whom, as far as he knew, might’ve been Gore) figure it out. I have never been exposed to any information that indicates that the 9/11 attacks would not have happened should there have been another President. Liberal, conservative, whatever - al-Qaeda sees us as all the same, and the planning for that attack predated results of the last election.
So, I’m not at all convinced we wouldn’t be at war today should Al Gore have won the election.
I would say the odds are better that 9/11 wouldn’t have happened if Gore had been President. Not because al-Qaeda wouldn’t have tried it, but because Gore and his appointees would have been more likely to pay attention.
Let’s face it – Bush is a man of limited intelligence and very strong convictions. This means he will prosecute any decision he makes vigorously, which is a good thing. But it also means that he’s unlikely to come up with good decisions, especially if doing so requires him to take into account facts or ideas that challenge his convictions. The odds are he’ll make bad decisions most of the time.
Attacking Afghanistan after 9/11 was a gimme – the Taliban was al-Qaeda’s biggest supporter and we had friends in the coutnry through our support of the Afghan’s durign the Russian incursion. I’m sure Gore would have done the same.
I’m also pretty sure Gore wouldn’t have attacked Iraq. He would have correctly seen it as a case of changing horses in midstream.
In short, he wouldn’t have been stupid like Bush has been. He would have gone after our attackers, al-Qaeda and their supprters, and prosecuted them with much more vigor than Bush has.
This is proof that it DOES make a difference who’s in the White House and that you shouldn’t elect stupid men to the Presidency, especially if their minds have snapped shut years ago.
You can draw your own conclusions about those who voted for Bush in 2000.
“Might” being the key word, yes, as several other posters have suggested (I wouldn’t even answer except that you addressed me specifically). It’s well-established how seriously the Clinton administration saw the threat from Al-Qaeda, although it’s arguable that even they didn’t take it seriously enough.
But it’s also well-established that Bush dismissed the warnings he was given in his briefings (“This foreign policy stuff is a little frustrating”), as part of his determination to do exactly the opposite of whatever the beast Clinton had done. The Congressional committee to study the origins of 9/11 still hasn’t convened, though, and won’t under GOP leadership, so we aren’t ever going to know more, much less be sure.
“Lawyered his way in” is an interesting use of transference, btw, to support the plaintiff in all legal (and extra-legal) actions that wanted the counting of votes stopped, while denigrating the party that wanted the fundamental principle of democracy upheld instead. On this board, though, there is little tolerance for people believing what they want in the face of the facts instead of because of them.