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

To: greenspirit who wrote (87200)	11/25/2000 11:06:53 AM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Article...NOW JOE'S A LIAR, TOO... Saturday,November 25,2000 nypostonline.com THERE have been lots of reasons to be disappointed in Joe Lieberman since Al Gore selected him as vice president - most especially the Connecticut senator's tactical reversal of his long-stated and brave opposition to affirmative action. But yesterday, for the first time, Lieberman crossed the line from being merely disappointing to being openly and utterly dishonest. He gave the most prominent public voice to the Democratic line that had been developing since Wednesday - the line about how the demonstration by Republican observers in Miami-Dade county was so threatening to the members of the canvassing board there that they were intimidated into abandoning the manual recount. It's a complete and total lie. Here's why. The evidence adduced to prove the charge comes entirely from the mouth of David Leahy, the county's supervisor of elections. In his statement yesterday, Lieberman quoted Leahy: "These demonstrations were clearly designed to intimidate . . . Shortly afterwards, one of the commissioners said, 'We would be up there counting' if it weren't for those objections." That's a complete misrepresentation of Leahy's words. What he actually said, in full, was this: "If what I had envisioned worked out and there were no objections, we'd be up there now counting." The objections Leahy was referring to were legal objections to the proposal Leahy had made - that, instead of doing a full manual recount, Miami-Dade deal only with the 10,000-plus ballots that had registered no vote when they went through the counting machines in order to meet the new five-day deadline set by the Florida Supreme Court. That proposal was plainly illegal, as Republican lawyers were arguing. By Florida law, if a manual recount is to be done, it must involve "all ballots." Not even the legislators of the Florida Supreme Court could find in the statute's language any wiggle room making it acceptable to enumerate by hand only the so-called "undervotes" while accepting the results of the machine recount completed on the day after the election. In a New York Times story yesterday headlined "Protest Influenced Miami-Dade's Decision to Stop Recount" that probably played a role in the Gore campaign's decision to send Lieberman out to the microphones, Leahy's words were again twisted to prove a false premise. The reporters, Dexter Filkins and Dana Canedy, wrote of "a rapid campaign of public pressure that at least one of the [Miami-Dade] board's canvassing members says helped persuade him to vote to stop the counting." That board member was David Leahy, and here's what the Times quotes him as saying: "This was perceived as not being an open and fair process. That weighed heavy on our minds." But the cause of that perception was not screaming Republicans. It was the fact that the canvassing board had decided to move the "undervote" counting process from a room open to the public to a room that could not accommodate the public, the press or observers from either the Democratic or Republican parties - also a patent violation of Florida's election law, which states categorically that "any manual recount shall be open to the public." In other words, the Republican protest - an act Lieberman said was "clearly designed to intimidate" - was entirely justified because the canvassing board had made two moves in direct contravention of the laws of Florida. The misconduct that went along with those protests - particularly the manhandling of a county Democratic official wrongly suspected of smuggling a ballot out of the counting room - was totally unacceptable and deserves all the condemnation in the world. But the protest itself was unexceptionable. In any case, Leahy is a bad witness for the prosecution here, because he had already voted against manual recounts - twice. As he said on Wednesday, "I have twice voted no. In my opinion, there was no requirement, or it wasn't warranted, that we do a full manual recount . . . When the board voted last week to have a full recount, I supported the decision. I've done everything I can do to carry out that decision of the majority of the board, but at this time I do not believe that there is time to carry out a complete, full manual recount that is accurate and that will count every vote, because of the limitations put on this board in terms of time." No matter. The Gore team remains determined to win at any cost, and the mainstream media are falling in lockstep. George W. Bush may well win this thing, but he will do so under nightmarish conditions only his worst enemy could wish on him. Until yesterday, Joe Lieberman wouldn't have qualified as one of those "worst enemies." But now he does, and it's a very sad thing to see the one-time "conscience of the Senate" complete the fall from grace that began the moment Al Gore picked him.