Balkinization: The President Discloses His Real Strategy For Winning the Election

Comments:

I took this to mean: "Alberto Gonzalez. But don't bother him, he's got dozens of more briefs to write telling me who I'm allowed to kill..."

# posted by

Christopher Chopin : 8:57 AM

I came to this site looking for some evenhanded analysis of the events surrounding the 2000 election. Instead I find just another shamelessly biased anti-Bush rant.

It’s fascinating to me that INVARIABLY, the people that ascribe to the United States Supreme Court the most base and vile political motivation for their intervention, conveniently omit any mention of the Florida Supreme Court’s role in the matter. That court consisted primarily of Democratic appointees, and the decision by which the Florida Supreme Court intervened in the vote counting process (at the request of the Democratic Party) was by a smaller majority than the decision by which SCOTUS later overturned their decision.

I would like SOMEONE--- ANY ONE--- to explain to me why it is inherently EVIL for the politically appointed justices of the United States Supreme Court to intervene in the Florida FEDERAL ELECTION, but that it is beyond criticism for the politically appointed justices of the Supreme Court of the State of Florida to intervene in that same election.

Obviously, it is just as absurd to accuse either court of being crudely biased because of supposed allegiance to those who appointed them, unless it can be shown that a Florida Supreme Court Justice is subject to control by Florida state-level politics.

What is most sad about the whole episode is that people will use their fine education and training to distort and twist and invert facts and logic to attempt to discredit a result they don’t like.

The entire problem with the Democratic Party’s assault on the Florida election was the repeated attempt to change the rules by which ambiguous ballots were interpreted, by Democratically-appointed and controlled election officials, sometimes in mid-recount. Each time it became apparent that the standards were not going to result in a GORE victory, the rules were made more lax, to allow greater leeway and so increase the chances that a ballot that would have been declared invalid under earlier rules, could now be included in the highly-subjective interpretation of its anonymous caster’s intention.

It would have been just as logical, and appropriate, to sacrifice chickens and read their entrails to determine the voters’ intent. I for one, am grateful that the Supreme Court of the United States put a stop to that nonsense. To have allowed that substitution of interpretation for actual ballot casting could set precedents the Democrats might come to regret in other elections where the same methods might produce outcomes less to their liking.

The whole point of fair elections is to avoid allowing subjective interpretation of voters’ intent.

In any case despite all the crude manipulations, not a SINGLE recount changed any Bush victory to a Gore victory.

The Supreme Court did not SELECT the victor of the Florida election. It simply validated the long-standing legislative rules of the state of Florida concerning the methods of vote counting, when the Florida Supreme Court showed it was ready to serve the partisan purposes of one political party over another, to suspend those laws and impose its own.

David March, animator & fiddler
dmarch@directcon.net

# posted by

Mad Fiddler : 1:22 PM