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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: amadeus who wrote (84142)	11/21/2000 11:32:36 PM
From: chalu2	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 769667

Republican rhetoric has been more than irresponsible. Should any innocent person be harmed as a result of this election, I think a grand jury would be justified in indicted Bush, and Baker for conspiracy to commit murder, and for inciting to riot.

To: amadeus who wrote (84142)	11/21/2000 11:46:50 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

You're right; while both sides have been fighting hand-to-hand over ballots, it's the Republicans who have been recklessly flinging charges of theft, fraud, and unpatriotism. Partisan Republicans seem to feel that they are owed this election because they failed to impeach President Clinton. George W. Bush seems to feel that he is owed the Presidency as a family legacy. It doesn't work that way. This is starting to get really annoying. Thomas Friedman had a column today in the New York Times that sums up the feelings on the Democratic side: Can Gore Ever Win? By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN While it all may sound like just partisan noise coming out of Florida these days, there's actually a big difference between how Al Gore and George W. Bush have been behaving. Mr. Gore has behaved as if this were the closest election in our modern history, and therefore every vote should be counted, recounted and hand counted, and should George W. Bush win Mr. Gore would have no problem declaring him the legitimate president. But one has to ask Mr. Bush: Is there any condition under which you would now accept Al Gore as the legitimate winner? I don't think so. Mr. Bush has behaved as if this were not a close election at all, as if he had won by a landslide, and therefore the notion that every last vote be hand-counted to determine the winner is only an effort to steal the election from him — the already obvious winner. And therefore, in Mr. Bush's view, under no condition can Al Gore ever be deemed the legitimate next president. By opposing any hand counts with a scorched-earth media blitz, Mr. Bush has left himself no room to be a gracious loser. He has left no scenario in which to say: "I lost fairly. Now let's all rally behind Al Gore." Mr. Bush needs to remember that he lost the popular vote in the country and he was ahead in Florida by only 300 votes out of six million before the absentees were counted. The fact is, this election was too close to call, and therefore conducting a hand count is both legal and legitimate, especially when it's being done under the same rules that apply in Texas. Mr. Gore made a fair proposal to hand-count every ballot in Florida, but Mr. Bush rejected that. Now that a more limited hand count is going forward, the Bush team is making wild, unsubstantiated allegations that the hand counters are engaged in fraud. No doubt there will be disputes, and mistakes, but there is no proof of systematic fraud. Where Mr. Gore is vulnerable is on which hand counts to count. Texas law allows for "dimpled" but unperforated ballots to be counted, and some Florida counties are doing that. But Mr. Gore needs to think hard about whether he wants to win on dimples. Either way, though, the Bush team will smear him. It is out to create an impression in the public's mind that if Mr. Gore wins by a hand count then by definition he stole the election. That is wrong, and so was Mr. Bush's spokeswoman, Karen Hughes, when she basically accused Mr. Gore of conspiring to have the absentee ballots of U.S. military personnel not counted, implying that this made him unfit to be commander in chief. Democrats and Republicans both know that many absentee ballots are always thrown out. Absentee balloting historically has been rife with fraud, so there are a lot of technical requirements — including that a ballot be postmarked by Election Day. And in this case the decision to follow the strict Florida absentee balloting rules, as opposed to the looser Federal ones, was set by the Republican secretary of state, Katherine Harris. I believe absentee ballots from soldiers should also be hand-counted to divine whether the absence of a postmark can be excused. But to allege fraud in this regard is utterly reckless. Our armed forces, the courts, the federal government — these are the nonpartisan institutions we need to hold our country together once there is a partisan outcome to this election. It was out of line for Ms. Hughes to imply that our armed forces are pro- Republican and that the Democrats were trying to prevent them from voting. Ms. Hughes might as well have called Mr. Gore a traitor. It would be like Mr. Gore accusing Mr. Bush of bigoted motives because he resisted recounts in counties with heavy black and Jewish populations. You just don't talk that way about the man who might be our next president. Mr. Bush needs to remember that there is a difference between what you can say about your opponent during the campaign and what you can say about him after the election is over, with the outcome too close to call, and with each side legitimately seeking to ensure that every vote is properly tabulated. Smearing your opponent during the campaign is politics as usual; smearing him during the recount after a vote too close to call is a threat to our institutions and the next presidency.