It was bad enough having to suffer through six months of polls purporting to demonstrate that 20 million voters were swinging back and forth wildly each week from Bush to Gore, back to Bush, and on and on. Finally -- finally! -- we took the only poll that really counts: A focus group of 100 million Americans choosing a president, insulated from Democrat harangues by the privacy of a secret ballot. Gore lost but refused to concede ... and now we're right back to hearing who the polls say should be president.
Gore deployed his lawyer David Boies -- who is fast becoming the William Ginsberg of the election -- to argue that the unambiguous seven-day deadline for election returns imposed by Florida law is optional. Just a suggestion. Nonbinding thoughts tossed out by the legislature.
In short order the media took up the cudgel: Who's to say? There are arguments on both sides. Democrats and Republicans are both just playing politics. The New York Times spoke of the Republicans' "contention" that the seven-day deadline was meant to indicate a seven-day deadline. Unambiguous statements of the law are now called mere "contentions." And for the final patina of legitimacy for a crackpot argument, the Florida kangaroo court "interpreted" seven days, as written in the law, to mean 19 days.
That really happened.
Indeed, only a Democrat could come up with Gore's brazenly illogical litigation posture. It is utterly incoherent, but coherence is irrelevant. Only spin matters.
Gore and his partisans insist on manual recounts (in only three heavily Democratic counties in a single state -- so that "every vote" will count!) They denounce the "butterfly" ballot as biased and borderline sadistic. They claim Democrat voters were intimidated from approaching the polls. (Evidently, Gore voters could be easily spotted on account of their tendency to follow traffic laws as well as they follow voting rules.)
Are you still with me? OK, how is it that a manual recount will remedy the problem of the "butterfly" ballot? How can it compensate people who claim they voted for the wrong guy by mistake (whoops! slipped!)? How will it rectify alleged voter intimidation? (And if humans are better than machines, what accounts for the runaway popularity of ATMs?)
If the whole point of this little exercise in "democracy" is to impair President Bush's legitimacy, winning will take care of that. Al Gore and his Democrat cult followers understand that, which is why they will say anything, do anything, to win.