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Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Coyne who wrote (8135)	12/1/2000 12:15:36 AM
From: ThirdEye	Respond to of 10042

Minority Report \| December 18, 2000 CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Yes, We're the Great Pretenders thenation.com By a combination of luck and pluck--natural luck and Nader's pluck--we got the Platonically ideal result, whereby both of the machine nominees lost. Since the Constitution can't recognize a tie at the electoral stage, I am writing this during the perfectly absurd moment when both defeated and discredited glove-puppets claim to have won. I can merely point out that the much vaunted "hand recounts" took on, in subjective form, the very same character that the machine process possessed in objective form. They tried to squeeze every American mind into one or another of the preordained columns. In Broward County, the gruesome figure of County Commissioner Suzanne Gunzburger at first declared that a ballot marked for any Democrat was a vote for Gore. This flatly negated the well-announced fact that many Florida citizens wished to vote for "none of the above" or to split their ticket for Nader. (I didn't see, all month, even one article that described the obstacles and frustrations faced by the third-party voter.) But to see the duel of the pretenders, you would imagine that vast issues of principle were at stake between them. (Seeing that phony Jerrold Nadler talk about "a whiff of fascism" in Florida would have been funny if it were not so grotesque.) The narcissism has turned almost to vandalism, with the whole apparatus of bourgeois democracy being trashed to no serious purpose. In just one week, attacks on the independence of the judiciary, on the integrity of public officials and even on the political neutrality of the armed forces--all for nothing! Let us always remember that these two crews were so intent on grabbing the sweets and rewards of office that they were prepared to depict their whole system as practically rotten in order to take command of it--and all the while shouting about how it was God's own country.