Once & For All: GORE LOST! Now, MoveOn.Org!
It serves no practical political purpose to continue the mantra that Gore actually won the election, and that W is a fictitious president appointed by the Supreme Court. Wait - I take that back - it serves a practical political purpose for the GOP.
Its hard for the average Liberalite to grasp the concept that "opinion" and "feeling" do not equal "fact". Opinion and feeling are the bedrock (quicksand, rather) of all their arguments. After all, if a Democrat loses an election to a Republican there HAD to be fraud involved, facts be damned!
Richard Baehr, writing at Real Clear Politics, details the latest round of back peddling by Paul Krugman, who's article from August 19, 2005 "What They Did Last Fall" is being dismantled by facts and reason. Here are some tidbits:
From Krugman on 08/19/2005:
Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore.
Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we've seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation.
From Richard Baehr in the American Thinker:
Both major consortiums undertook to count all the disputed votes (the so-called “undercount”) in a variety of ways. This was because different counties had used different methods for counting or not counting hanging chads, or partially punched ballots during the Florida recount. The consortium wanted to see if using one methodology as opposed to another would have produced a different result. So they tested a liberal counting of all partially punched ballots statewide. They considered a tougher standard requiring ballots to be completely punched through to be counted. They considered standards in between these two. The heterogeneity in the post election counting methodologies used by different county officials, was the major reason the Supreme Court by a 7 to 2 majority vote (including votes by liberal justices Souter and Breyer) concluded that the process as established by the Florida Supreme Court (which provided no systematic methodology to be used in the statewide recount of the undervote) was badly flawed and broken, and would result in a denial of the equal protection of the law to voters in different counties in Florida.
When the two newspaper consortia concluded their surveys, their conclusions were identical: by almost every method selected to count the undervote, had all the ballots been counted statewide, Bush would have won, and not Gore. There were a few methodologies that would have produced a very narrow Gore victory, but the great majority of the different approaches produced a Bush win.
If the methodology that Gore advocates had pushed on the Florida Supreme Court been adopted, it would have resulted in a Bush victory. In no case, can one make the assertion that Krugman does, that the consortia simply concluded Gore would have won, absent a deliberate attempt to distort the results of the studies undertaken by the newspaper consortia.
To read the Krugman column, one might think that there is a pattern in close elections, namely that Republicans steal them. Not surprisingly, Krugman does not mention the results in the New Mexico Presidential race in 2000,when Bush led the recount, until one county suddenly reversed their count to change the outcome. He also makes no mention of Wisconsin, where in two consecutive elections, Democratic campaign workers have been fingered for criminal behavior, including slashing the tires of GOP buses and vans intended to get voters to the polls on Election Day. Krugman likes to calls this sort of thing voter suppression - if aimed at African American voters.
fact, 2000 in Florida is the exception to the rule- that most close election results the last few years have been decided for the Democrats.
Even if the Liberalite delusions were true, it does no good to wallow in the past or fret about things which cannot be undone. One who is constantly looking backward - can't lead anyone anywhere. Unfortunately, since Liberalites lack vision and have no coherent message - the past is all they have.
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