May 21, 2001

Oh, you missed that one?  Why, it was right there on page A-37 of your local paper, right under a liposuction ad.  Almost as prominent as the two weeks of glaring headlines the story got back in late January, complete with Bush aides' statements that "we don't want to make a big deal of this."  Riiiiiiight.   Considering that it never happened, only a cynic would wonder who came up with it.   And we aren't cynics.  Are we?

Actually, what is most disturbing about the "vandalism" story is not that the Bushters floated it and then told a few wink-and-nod, not-quite-lies about it (at least on the record; obviously they lied through their teeth on background).   We expect that of the Bushters.  What is more disturbing - and, most disturbing of all, unsurprising - is that the media ran hog wild with it. As usual, none of the 10,000 or so Investigative Reporters in Beltwayland managed to do, or cared to do, any actual reporting, much less investigating.  Peculiar, isn't it?

All of which leads to another interesting story.  This one actually made the front page of the Los Angeles Times, and above the fold at that, albeit with a confusing (and small-print) headline.  This one involved a purge - all too accurate a term - of the Florida voter rolls, carried out in the months before last fall's election.  It seems that the Florida secretary of state's office hired a firm to make sure that convicted felons' names were taken off the voter rolls.

The firm hired to do this, alas, was none too careful in its methodology - and in fact was goaded on to be less careful by the secretary of state's team.  As an unsurprising (and, one suspects, not-unintended) result, a whole lot of people who were not felons were also tossed off the Florida voter rolls.  By remarkable coincidence, a lot of them were black.  By a still more remarkable coincidence, most black voters in Florida - those whose names didn't magically vanish from the voter rolls - voted for Al Gore.

Oh, yes, a couple of more coincidences.  The last I looked, the Florida secretary of state is a woman named Katherine Harris.  Unlike most state secretaries of state, she is not particularly obscure, at least not since last November.  Oddly, though, the Los Angeles Times article never mentioned her name.  Perhaps readers were expected to know this, but the LAT usually mentions people's names when they come up in an interesting context, even when the name is well-known.

The final coincidence is that the firm hired to do the purging, "Database Technologies" (now part of another outfit called "ChoicePoint") is said to have a history of connections with the Bush family.  I can't vouch for the last - it was reported in the British Guardian, but not the red-white-and-blue American media, which means all decent Americans have to regard it as mere rumor. 

It all ads up to an interesting pattern.  Now, I don't think the estimable Ms. Harris hired this outfit specifically to keep Florida blacks from voting for Al Gore, even though the number thus denied their right to vote is obviously far larger than Bush's Official Victory Margin of 537 votes.  Not even Harris or Jeb "I categorically deny an affair" Bush could have been that prophetic.  But - let's get real - Florida, at least in my atlas, is in a part of the country with a long history of denying uppity blacks the vote. 

In one sense, to be sure, all of this, like the butterfly ballot and much else, falls into the hazy realm of might-have-beens.  The same can be said of the big media recount, the results of which were supposedly going to come out this month.  No one expects that, if the recount shows that Gore "really" won, GW Bush will say "Oops!" and vacate the White House.  If, however, the recount shows that Bush "really" won - or would have won, under any conceivable standard of counting - you can be sure we will hear a loud and sustained chorus from the Bushters and their allies in the media.

I don't know who would have won an honest count of votes cast.  I do know that Al Gore would have won a well-run election ... or simply an election where voters weren't mysteriously thrown off the voting rolls.  Even that, though, ignores the real heart of what happened in Florida. 

Whatever the final result, if we ever know it, we do know what both sides believed last November - that a full and honest recount would give Al Gore Florida and the White House.  Obviously no Bushter would say that openly, then or now, but plenty of "Republican strategists" were quoted as admitting it at the time.  In other words, the Bushters followed their Florida strategy of stalling on a recount in the conscious belief that they were stealing the election.

Now, suppose a presidential candidate in some Third World country were not happy with the election results, and dealt with his concerns by surrounding the presidential palace with tanks and shooting his way in.  That would be a coup ... and would not magically become an un-coup, even if it eventually turned out that he won the vote he chose to ignore.

The analogy is not exact, of course.  Judges - even the likes of Thomas, Scalia, and "that clown Renchburg" - are not tanks, and what Bush did was not a coup.   Not quite.  Not exactly.  But it comes much too close. 

I will stipulate that Bush is the lawful president.  Military officers do not have a duty to disobey him - to arrest him - as they would if he were an actual putschtist.   This, however, does not make him a morally legitimate president, one who can claim to have been elected by the people.  At best he was "elected" by fluke; at worst by swindle.  Having ignored the votes when it could have mattered, he cannot fall back on them now, even if a media recount offers scenarios in which he might have won honestly.

And, since Bush did not choose to face an honest vote count, it is time for Beltway Democrats to stop pretending he was fairly elected, stop treating him as though he has a mandate - and quit coddling the pundits who you to pretend he does, and want us all to ignore what we all know happened. 

If you want the next election to matter, you had better start acting as if the last one should have mattered.

-- Rick Robinson

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Last revised 11/07/2006 ... by RM Robinson

Email me: Lyonesse@compuserve.com

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