George W. Bush won.
Sen. John Kerry gave a concession speech, but not until 2 p.m. ET Wednesday did he say, "It is now clear that even when all the provisional ballots are counted -- which they will be -- there won't be enough outstanding votes for us to able to win Ohio, and therefore, we cannot win this election."
What took him so long?
Back in 2000, Al Gore angered some Democrats by ultimately conceding the election. They still feel, despite Bush's Supreme Court victory, that somehow Gore could have and should have fought on. So after whipping his supporters into a white-hot frenzy of Bush hatred, how does Kerry then become magnanimous and statesman-like?
Privately, no doubt, Kerry and his aides saw the inevitable. Publicly, however, the Kerry campaign found itself in a box. Kerry supporters considered the 2000 presidential election stolen, in part through some sort of connivance between the president, his brother Jeb (governor of Florida) and Florida's Republican Secretary of State, Katherine Harris. Many of Kerry's supporters consider Bush a conniving, lying, manipulating, misleading, arrogant, illegitimate occupier of the White House. Now what did you expect Kerry to do? Come out and, in a statesman-like fashion, tell his supporters, "Chill out"?
Meanwhile, the War on Terror continues. But the terrorists are mourning.
One night, driving home, I noticed a rare -- in my area -- Bush/Cheney bumper sticker: "10 Out of 10 Terrorists Agree, Anybody But Bush." I thought about the bumper sticker when I read the transcript of Osama bin Laden's videotape, played on Al Jazeera just days before our presidential election. The media made much out of Osama bin Laden's "first direct admission" of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
But the real emphasis is bin Laden's clear disdain for Bush and, therefore, preference for Kerry. According to a translation, bin Laden said, "It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone." Bin Laden also said, "It appeared that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers, resulting in our having three times the required time to carry out the operations."
Right out of Michael Moore's playbook. Continued... |