Debunk This (Bush won legally)

[HFishbine]

Okay folks, help me out on this guest editorial to my local paper.
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I am sick to death of the incessant whining about the 2000 election, about the Supreme Court appointing George Bush to the presidency. The peanut brains in the peanut gallery fail to mention or conveniently forget several salient factors:

1. The Supreme Court only became involved when the Florida Supreme Court would not reverse its illegal directive about the south Florida vote count.

2. By a 7-2 vote, citing the Equal Protection Clause, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that "very serious constitutional problems" were raised by the irregular recount methods being used by the Democratic majority recount board, including determining "voter intent."

3. Despite voting with the seven-vote majority, two of the seven then reversed to become part of the four-vote minority that voted to continue the recount that they had just said was constitutionally flawed.

4. The entire debacle would have been avoided had not the networks erroneously called Florida for Gore before the polls closed in western Florida (a highly Republican area.) Not only did the networks call the state for Gore, they repeatedly declared the polls in Florida were closed, which was a lie.

The writer makes more points which the DU copyright restrictions prohibit me from posting, but please take a look: http://www.news-record.com/news/opinions/letters/underletts_122003.htm

[for_al]

1. Debunk this

The writer raises many points that are difficult to debunk without sounding whiny. Leave it alone.

[Bunny]

2. Okay.

Easy for you to say.:eyes:

[JohnLocke]

3. Welcome to DU, for_al!

:toast: :toast: You'll like it here.

[SpiralHawk]

9. This is not a whine. It's a Bad-Ass Bellow

Bush and Family stole the election and they and their cronies are steadily imposing a Crypto-Christo-Corpo-Plutocracy in the United States of America.

True patriots recognize this immediately, and strive to preserve our freedoms and our democracy.

You want to hear whining? Tune in drug-addict Rush Limbaugh. Now there's a whiner...earning over $2 million a year and relentlessly dumping on the people at the bottom of the economic heap for collecting unemployment or welfare. What a whine ass.

[Name removed]

11. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Room101]

16. Watch this..........

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/progs/newsnight/palast.ram

[Coldgothicwoman]

4. Whoa whoa whoa...

They called it for Bush, not Gore...I watched that election! At least, Fox News did.

No, many of them are hard to debunk without proper contextualized information. If people want to consider that 'whiny', it only shows that they've become over-saturated with sound bites. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get our point across to those new sources who may, just may, not have heard the reality before.

[TrueAmerican]

6. That's right they did call it for Bush, not Gore

Then Gore, Then Bush, Then Gore, then Bush.

I beleive the writer is confuse, that was the 1996 election when the networks said the polls were closed in Florida, not 2000.

[Bandit]

Irreparable Harm

That is the key. How could one person suffer irreparable harm and not the other when the votes had not been counted? Bush* succeeded in getting the recounts stopped on that basis and yet there was no way he could have been hurt. The only people that could have standing were the voters. Bush* had no standing. A crime was committed but not by Bush*. It was by the extreme court themselves and that is why they say there can be no precedent. The whole purpose for the Supreme Court is to establish Precedent. Never ever ever has there been a ruling without establishing precedent. :shrug: So we should just "get over it".

[gulliver]

5. I always say he won "technically"

Bush did win the lawsuit after all.

But that doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of dirty pool in Florida before (mostly) and after the election. Bush's is the dirtiest "win" in history. Although Bush is technically and legally president, he will always be illegitimate.

It's funny how Republicans attack lawyres, but they love the ones who put Bush in the White House. Just an observation.

[coloradodem2005]

7. Someone had told me....

....There are two major rules regarding elections in Florida.

1. THere is a timetable that must be adhered to. Election results need to be determined in a certain amount of time.

2. When an election is close, like the presidential election in Florida, the first rule does not apply. So the will of the people can be determined.

The Republicans and the supreme court adhered to the first one, but not the second one. THere is actually a book about this called: The Betrayal of America. This book deals with the 2000 election. Someone had told me about it. I looked it up on Amazon.com, but I cannot find it in Barnes and Noble. Unfortunately.

[RBHam]

8. Vincent Bugliosi

States it simply : Antonin Scalia broke the law. He should be impeached.

But he has friends you don't refuse when they come searching to make a deal.

[Narraback]

13. The Nation version of his article

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010205&s=bugliosi

[Mairead]

10. The best refutation is that

in a democracy, all legal votes are to be fully counted. Counting legal votes is the only legitimate way to determine the outcome of an election. There is no legitimate way to say 'well we won't do that this time but the vote is still valid'. If you don't count the votes, the outcome is not valid. If you have enough guys with guns you can stop the counting, declare your action to be legal and tell people to shut up about it --which is how it worked under the Nazis and Soviets-- but honest people aren't fooled. They might be silenced, but they're not fooled.

We know from counts done later that Gore got the majority of legal votes (even ignoring the thousands of people illegally disenfranchised).

[knight_of_the_star]

12. His numbers are off

The Supreme Court vote was 5-4. And if you ever manage to ask any of the justices in the minority on that one what they thought, they were steaming mad over the ruling.

[alcuno]

14. Can you imagine how humiliating it must be for these Republicans?

To know that their guy is in office but that the people really didn't want him? I often think about what it must feel like to know that your slacker politician, with almost twice as much money and the American media behind him, STILL couldn't get the people to vote for him. That he was actually placed there against the will of the people. How humiliating! It must make them all the more desperate about the next election.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

15. Responses to the points in your post alone without reading the article...

1) The U. S. Supreme Court became involved when the NeoCon Junta failed to get the decision they wanted from the Florida Supreme Court. One has only to look at the number of children of U. S. Supreme Court Justices who landed high-paying Government jobs to understand a part of the repayment for the "correct" vote. Additionally, the situation in Florida was an internal Florida state issue involving massive voting irregularities within the state of Florida. By the stated judicial philosophy of the conservative Supreme Court Justices, they should never have heard that case.

Those "irregularities" included:

***Katherine Harris' involvement in the so-called "felons list" causing the "scrubbing" of more than 50,000 voters;

***Florida police involvement in the redirection of thousands of minority voters to other polling places on the day of the election only to discover those polling places did not have their names;

***The introduction of the "butterfly ballot" by a former operative of Adnan Khoshoggi of Iran-Contra fame which resulted in a ballot confusing to seniors and the infamous "hanging chad" controversy;

***Quite a few other issues here, but they have been well-stated by others.

2) That 7-2 decision was also based on a very narrow view of the florida voting irregularities. Had the U. S. Supreme Court really intended to hand down a fair ruling, they would have asked for a recount of the entire state, regardless of the time and money involved.

3) More Freeper sidestepping of the issues. Those two judges realized much too late that much more was going on behind the scenes than they had originally thought. Had one more judge who voted with the 5-judge majority come to the same conclusion as quickly as the first two judges, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in today. And by "mess", I'm referring to the ongoing wars in the Middle East, the massive erosion of Civil Rights, and the piss-poor economy. Add to that the complete evaporation of the budget surplus and its' replacement by a record deficit, and we have some major problems thanks to the Coup of 2000.

4) Sorry, but the networks called it correctly based on the reports of the organization that was doing the exit polling for all of the networks. That organization was immediately shut down after that call. Shortly after that, a 50,000 vote "mistake" was found in the vote recording software, reversing Gore's lead in Florida and putting Junior ahead.

If anyone wants to consider my points as "whining", have at it. I'm getting real tired of being told what to say and what not to say in a forum that is supposedly dedicated to free speech.

[grasswire]

17. if the supreme court...

....were in the right, they would not have made their ruling unusable as precedent. They twisted the law for this occasion, and admitted the twisting by saying it could not be precedent (as rulings of the SC are meant to be).

But the best defense is to ask (as wink modeled in another thread) what Republicans would be saying about that election had the shoe been on the other foot. If it were Gore whose family cronies packed the Supreme Court. If it were Gore whose pal was FL secretary of state. If it were Gore whose brother ordered thousands of voters disqualified illegally.

How would Republicans characterize election 2000 if that were the scenario?

[kaitykaity]

18. Greg Palast was all over this also.

Important numbers:

1) 97,000 black voters purged from voter rolls because they
had a name like a possible felon.

2) 3,000 Democratic absentee ballots thrown away in Seminole and
Martin counties, while 5,000 Republican absentee ballots were fixed
and counted.

3) 19,000 butterfly ballots in Palm Beach County. All those old
Jews voted for Nazi Pat Buchanan.

Any one of these murders that 537 vote Bush victory.

[procopia]

19. Determining voter intent

was required by Florida Law for all machine-unreadable ballots (in close elections); it was not a method devised by recount boards. That was the catch 22 for the Florida Supreme Court. If they followed state law for the recount, the standards for counting would differ from precinct to precinct and would (supposedly) violate the equal protection clause. However, if they had set a uniform standard for counting, they would have been "changing the law," which they had been previously warned against by the USSC.