Re: What most surprises me about all of this is how people write as though there is only one correct side to this.
The Republicans perceive the ballots involved in the handcounts as improper votes - therefore any attempt to count them is considered to be manipulation from the Democrats.
Of course, the Democrats see those votes as perfectly legal votes - and counting them as the very essence of democracy. They therefore perceive any attempt to block the counting of those votes as manipulation and bullying.....
And what surprises me most about all this election mess is how easily US public opinion got bamboozled into the most futile part of a flagrant Bilderberg/Israeli conspiracy to wreck a Republican win in the latest presidential ballot....
I mean, for God's sake, back away from the current pettifogging lawsuits, the Florida recounts, and the partisan courtrooms and judges that have, so far, hugged the limelight for the past 30 days. Turn the clock back on November 7th, in the evening and recall that Vice President Al Gore actually gave GW Bush a buzz to congratulate him as the likely President elect.... Now, the official story about that first, straight phone call doesn't hint at any haggling between the two candidates --such a bargaining would indeed badly tarnish the image of both statesmen, whoever started it.
It's my belief that Gov. GW Bush didn't budge on his transition appointments and didn't want to trade off his presidency against a coupla "bipartisan" appointments as regards his foreign policy. Hence VP Gore's second phone call to GW Bush: the Governor's intransigence triggered an all-out war with Gore's powerful backers, namely the Bilderberg corporate lobby and the pro-Israeli hawks (former Israeli PM Benyamin Netanyahu was in the US till December 10th and do you think that PM Ehud Barak's sudden resignation just after the USSC stopped the Florida recount was a mere coincidence??).
As Americans, you should always bear in mind that your country is a global superpower, not only at the military level but at the economic one as well. GW Bush ran afoul of powerful people who've got a vested interest in keeping the Euro-American relationship up and running. Besides, Colin Powell and Condi Rice, as Bush's likely key advisers on foreign matters, give both Israel and Europe the willies since the former used to deal with mostly Jewish officials in the State Dept. for the past 10 years and the latter fears that Europe's monopoly in Africa will be challenged.
Now, more than one month after election day (Nov 7th), the very fabric of the whole US democracy is in a shambles.... Obviously, both political camps are blaming each other and each party can find a lawyer to outbid its rival by accusing it of dragging on the litigation before courtroom after courtroom.... But who started the whole mess in the first place?? If VP Gore behaved like a statesman he would never have agreed to stooge in the Florida masquerade and, accordingly, would never have given GW Bush that second, bathetic phone call!
Now I see what you're driving at: "...the Democrats see those votes as perfectly legal votes - and counting them as the very essence of democracy."
The very essence of Democracy?!?!? GIMME A BREAK, PLEEASE!!! As I said in another thread, such a narrow-minded focus on vote counting betrays a WARHOLIAN NOTION OF DEMOCRACY. Indeed, just as Andy Warhol wittily hinted at, true fame lasts longer than 15 minutes and only a fool could take for granted his/her "15-minute fame" on TV, radio, you name it!
Likewise, true democracy doesn't begin and end with the ballot box! The election circus that opens every four years merely is the tip of the political iceberg and, however important it is, should not be considered as the alpha-and-omega of the US democracy.... Blacks, Latinos, and other minorities are disenfranchised in their everyday lives when they're denied a job, a house, a good education for their children, medicare, medicaid, or even freedom of expression in the media! But that's the kind of disenfranchising your brave politicos --Republicans and Democrats alike-- have a much harder time coping with --including "White Knight" Gore!
But then again, just watch the current mess you're in.... was it worth it? Does your country, at this moment in time, need --as your pro-Israeli media and their Democrat strawmen claim-- an umpteenth "fair recount" in a handful Floridian counties to "save" your democracy and "preserve" the legitimacy of your next President or does it only need to turn the page and move forward, under a new Republican leadership? Just see how slimy those Bilderberg stooges are: they're the ones who've wickedly fouled America's foremost political fabric, that is the Presidency itself. Right now, they don't even recoil from smearing America's highest judicial institution, namely the US Supreme Court of Justice!! (see yesterday's comment by W. Christopher on CNN) But who cares anyway, since the worm's already in the apple? (see the document below) And after they've damaged the whole thing, these hypocrites come to the TV and say, "well, we all want this excruciatingly long dispute to be over.... really, we're doing our best to end it! If only those Republicans'd let us replay the game in Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, Broward, and whatnot...."
January 30, 2000
Is Nothing Secular?
The wall between church and state is crumbling. The reason has less to do with Pat Roberston than with the triumph of identity politics. By JEFFREY ROSEN
www2.kenyon.edu
Excerpt:
It's striking how closely the positions of some of the [Supreme] justices in the church-state cases correspond to their own religious and educational backgrounds. Three of the four most ardent proponents of equal treatment for religion (Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas) are practicing Catholics, and two of them attended parochial schools. Scalia graduated at the top of his class from Xavier High School, a Jesuit academy in Manhattan, where he was, according to a classmate, a religious and political archconservative. Thomas, who returned to Catholicism after a period of worshiping at an Episcopal church in Virginia, attributes his success to the discipline imposed on him by the Irish Catholic nuns who taught him at parochial school in Savannah in the late 1950's.
Indeed, the fact that you may not have noticed that there are now three Catholics on the court is itself a significant sign of a change in the relationship between religion and government. One test of a group's integration into American society, observes Walter Dellinger, is the point at which no one thinks the trait in question is a relevant consideration in a Supreme Court nomination. Within a single generation, Catholicism, like geographical origin, has simply become beside the point.
By this standard, Jews have completed the integration process as well: when Stephen Breyer became the second Jew appointed by President Clinton, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg, his religion was hardly noted, even though it put Protestants in a minority on the court for the first time in American history. (David Souter and Sandra Day O'Connor are Episcopalians; William Rehnquist is a Lutheran; and John Paul Stevens lists his affiliation simply as "Protestant.") Nevertheless, Ginsburg and Breyer have retained the separationist instincts of relatively secular Jews born before World War II. Ginsburg, who was director of the A.C.L.U. women's rights project in the 1970's, has been an especially uncompromising separationist. Indeed, religion is the one area in which Ginsburg and Breyer seem like unreconstructed liberals from another era.
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