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:: MAX BLACK ::

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --C.S. Lewis

"The Swiss pocket knife of conservative thought on the web..." - Eli Kardrakian

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:: Friday, May 28, 2004 ::

Amid all of the unprecedented and hyperbolic vitriol this election season, it might be good to revisit the contoversial 2000 Presidential election for a refresher course on the Florida recount. Upshot? Bush won...no matter how you hang your chad:

" The unspoken truth of the 2000 election dispute in Florida is always ignored by the left: Gore never led; not on election night, not after any statewide recount, not after adding the votes from county hand recounts, and not even in the exhaustive statewide post-election recounts conducted by the major state and national newspapers (in almost all of which Bush wound up ahead when any consistent method of counting was used.) Pick your method of counting chads, and it doesn't matter. Bush won.

Another myth is that Gore simply wanted all the votes counted. This is absolutely false. Gore lawyers and their supporters attempted to disqualify votes of some military voters overseas, and of absentee voters in several Florida counties. Both groups, not surprisingly, strongly supported Bush.

On the other hand, they tried to create votes that the machines had determined contained no vote for President (the "undervote"), but only in four heavily Democratic counties: Broward, Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia. In each of these counties, Democratic Party officials would control the hand count of the "undervote." So this was no exercise in civic minded duty - the logic was to find votes for Gore, and cancel votes for Bush.

The left likes to say that the United States Supreme Court gave the election to Bush. They did no such thing. What they did was reverse the Florida Supreme Court's effort to keep on counting until Gore won. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Bush v Gore may not have been a model of jurisprudence, but the left also ignores the fact that the decision to over-rule the Florida Supreme Court was not a 5-4 decision dictated by the five conservative members of the Court, but a 7 to 2 decision. Even two liberals on the Court were offended by the machinations of the Florida court and its creation of a chaotic vote counting system for the "undervotes".

This is a classic American Thinker essay by Richard A. Baehr. As they say, RTWT.

Update: In the weeks preceeding the election, look for MSM to dust-off all of the hanging-chad video footage and replay it ad nauseum with the clear implication that the last election was stolen by Bush. Also, look for Algore to be color (?!) commentator on at least one of the alphabet channels on election night.

:: Max 12:21 PM [+] ::
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