Dear Vice President Gore:
It appears that your advisors have advised you to challenge federal election laws. It also appears that your advisors have advised you to challenge federal election laws by refusing to concede this election, should it turn out that you lose, and to prepare for that challenge by issuing a plan of battle before the results of the election are known.
With all due respect, I think you are making a grave mistake. The spin that your advisors have decided to put on this Plan is "This is not about politics, it's about the 'Will of The People.'"
That's a bad spin, Mr. Gore. It really is. It's a lie.
You and I both know that what you are doing has nothing to do with the "Will of The People", because the election process has been in place for a long time, and it was put there by The "Will of The People." The laws are there, and the law is clear. It's the law. You understand that. You are a lawyer. The People created the law.
The fact is that this is all about politics. That's fine, I understand that, because you are a politician. I understand why you can't say it's politics, because what you are really doing is challenging the law. You can't say "It's about challenging federal law".
See, the deal is this: if you lose the election, you lost it fair and square. The rules are the rules. If you don't like the rules, you have the opportunity to change the rules - but there is no "retroactive election rule changing" in this country...yet.
There are no mulligans here.
You must understand, sir, that you are opening the door to having every election from now on be decided by lawyers. Surely you understand the implications of this. Your actions of late indicate that your intention is to challenge federal law. If you do it the way your people are threatening to do it on television, this sort of thing will never stop.
Your advisors have been able to instrument a very unfortunate state of affairs in this country. Many people are angry. People who were not angry with each other last week are now angry with each other, because of you and your advisors and the people who are working with you. You might claim that this is a good thing. I don't think it is. I don't think anger does much good under most circumstances. I think you have a Bad Advisor. Maybe more than one.
We don't know who won the election yet. We don't know what happened to those 19,000 ballots in Florida. We don't know if anything illegal went on. We don't know a lot of things yet. But we know what you think happened, and what the alleged consequences of what you think happened are. There is a big difference between what somebody claims to have happened and what really happened. We still don't know what happened, so it's a bit early to explain to us what we don't know happened really did happen and why what we don't know happened happened assuming that it happened at all.
All we know is that it looks like you lost the election. But we now know something else about you. If you and your people continue on this course that you have chosen, you will change things in the United States of America.
I trust you understand the implications of your actions. I hope you make the right decisions. If you are as honest and as ethical as you claim, the choice is clear - as we say in the stock market; "Let your winners run and cut your losses and you will live to fight another day. Take a big loss, and the game is over."
Good luck.
TLC
Flamfoozy Mark VII
In Orbit |
