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

To: Srexley who wrote (124500)	1/30/2001 7:15:56 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

Scott, My first anger has always been for the elections officials who did such a bad job (BTW, I just remembered that the NYTimes graphic of rejected ballots by county in Florida had one category labeled "Over 12%"). If they had counted all the legal ballots the first or second time round, it would have been much fairer and it would have been legal. Did you find anything illegal about the alternate-universe Katherine Harris' letter I wrote? Didn't you find it strange that in real life the SOS expressed no interest at all in getting an accurate count? If the legal votes had been counted then Al Gore wouldn't have had 10,000 Miami/Dade undervotes to go after in the first place. Given Al Gore's attack, I would have had much more respect for the Republicans if they had just attacked the selectivity of Gore's recount requests, and offered to negotiate a strict, statewide recount. Of course, they couldn't do that because they might lose. In fact, would probably lose, given the Democratic tilt of the undervote and overvote. Instead they attacked not just Gore, but manual recounts per se. Let me remember: "No one can do manual recounts -- it's purely subjective." I guess all the previous cases were flukes, huh? "Manual recounts are a always chaotic" It was a basic part of the Republican strategy to make them into a circus. "The Dems are inventing votes!" They began saying this before any recount started. Proper procedure was followed, and Republican observers were present. "Gore just wants to keep counting until he's ahead" Well sure -- but what is he counting? are they legal votes? "All the votes have been counted, 3 or 4 times!" Not true "He's had recount after recount!" Not true "Undervotes only happen when someone decides not to vote." Ridiculous on the face of it. While all the spin was going on, they, the conservatives, ran into Federal Court to stop recounts in a state election. Meanwhile they delayed the recounts as much as they could. Now this strikes me as pretty shameless and willing to do anything to win. Is is okay just cause Jim Baker was doing the spinning while Dubya was hiding at the ranch? As I said before, the Bushes have always been good at distancing themselves from the dirty work. As for the SC, I think the minority tried to negotiate a compromise ruling with the majority. It worked on the first decision and failed on the second. If you believe the second decision was apolitical, then you must believe that Scalia would have ruled exactly the same way if Gore had been ahead and Bush had gotten a recount. I don't believe it.