Originally posted by: Corbett
Come on Craig. It cant be that hard to prove your points since you have done so much research! Please explain how you came to conclusion that GWB stole the 2000 election. Then prove how he lied to bring us into war.
Corbett, there's no point spending the time to lay out an issue for some people - call them trolls, ideologues, whatever, but they don't have any interest in the truth.
You have shown yourself to be such a person to me, sadly. I can point you to books; will you read them? I don't think so.
This issue is large enough that I can lay out some highlights, but to get into the details of the 'proof' is almost writing a book. It needs some effort on your part, that's lacking.
But I'll give you a few bullets on the issue, which you could look into easily - but you won't, you'll post a cheap, fallacious, response which I'll finally just ignore.
First, you have repeatedly claimed I said Bush lied to bring us into war; I'm not the one saying that. I have some views on the issue, but that's another topic.
Second, saying the election was stolen is not the same as saying, as you again put words in my mouth, that GWB stole it. I'm not saying that, either.
The most important issue is that the election put the man who lost the election in office; we need to ask how that happened and try to prevent it next time.
Here are a few of the problems, each of which was far more than enough to swing the election's 537 vote margin:
- Accidental: The butterfly ballot, which gave thousands of votes intended for Gore to Patrick Buchanan - as Buchanan acknowledges.
This was not intentional, but the accidental effect of a poor ballot.
- Accidental/suspicious: more democratic/poor/black districts had far higher (up to 10%) vote disqualication rates while the most white counties had the lowest (as low as 1%).
This also cost many thousands of Gore voters their votes. The cause was democratic counties spending less on the election by using the less ecpensive centralized vote counting, while the white counties used the more expensive local vote counting, where the machine identified any error immediately and let the voter fix it.
There is a report that Katherine Harris had this demonstrated to her, and she sat on the info to let the democrats make the mistake.
- Intentional: Katherine Harris' office implemented a very defective system for identifying 'suspected felon voters' and removing them from the voter lists. The way they did this was set up to identify far too many people, by using very loose matching that very disproportionately identified black voters and removed them (much more than their percent as felons in the population). This, too, cost Gore thousands of votes.
Katherine Harris' office was warned about the problems, and directed them to actually make the matching even less accurate.
- Intentional: Denial of voting rights to ex-felons who had the right to vote who had moved to Florida.
Courts had to order Katherine Harris' office to stop removing these people from the voting lists repeatedly; Katherine Harris' offive showed they knew they had done wrong by sending a letter to counties to remove the voters, and then denying to an investigative reporter they had done so, sending him a false letter saying the opposite. He obtained the original letter from her office. Here, too, thousands of voters were affected.
One more note - even with all these problems, had the votes simply been counted under Florida law, as the Florida Supreme Court and 4 of 9 US Supreme Court justices were going to order, Al Gore would have won the recount. We know this from the comprehensive recount done by the Media Consotrium, paid for by the major media companies, the reuslts released sortly after 9/11.
Unfortunately, the story was broadly mis-reported. The recount showed that Gore won, under every scenario in which the voters' intent was counted, which is the standard specified by Florida law. Apparently the media companies didn't want to report that Gore had won at the height of 9/11 fever, and so they created some pointless alternative counting methods, called 'undervote' counting, under which Bush won; this had no clear use but to let them say under some counting, Bush won.
There were some other controveries as well, but when you look at the issues, the balance shows Gore won.
This led to quotes such as the following report quoting Jimmy Carter saying Gore had clearly won 'without a doubt' (easy to find with Google):
There is "no doubt in my mind that Gore won the election," the erstwhile President [Carter] declared, saying the 2000 election process "failed abysmally."
So, there're your pointers, now you can go read and confirm and deal with the truth, or you can post a lame snipe post based on the ignorance of not doing the research.
Prove me wrong on which to expect. I predict it's likely, but not certain, you will put partisanship first and democracy second and refuse to deal with the facts.