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By Root 739 0

sexual encounter in a small office with a broken air conditioner. There was the Harris-directed purging of thousands of legitimate black voters from the rolls; the relentless legal and extra-legal efforts to prevent an accurate counting of the votes—including a manufactured mob of Republican congressional aides flown in from Washington to scream and pound on the doors of the Miami-Dade canvassing board; the double standard the Bush campaign applied to military ballots, stretching the law to accept those in Bush counties, even as they were challenging those in counties that went for Gore—all while accusing the Democrats of “going to war against the men and women who serve in our armed forces in an effort to win at any cost.” Although Republicans controlled every lever of power in the state, they shrieked that the venal Democrats were subverting the system to steal the presidency.

But if there’s one enduring symbol of the Florida coup d’etat, it is the tongue of Mac Stipanovich, the Republican lobbyist who was put in Harris’s office to be her “minder.”7 That tongue not only brought almost unimaginable pleasure to Katherine Harris, but also to Jeb Bush, Karl Rove, and George W. Bush. I’m not suggesting he had sex with the Bushes, or even Karl Rove. But I can’t say for sure that he didn’t. As BJU Professor Richard Hand would point out, that’s a universal negative and impossible to prove.

Once Clarence Thomas, after considering the matter dispassionately, had cast the deciding vote in Bush v. Gore, thereby allowing his wife to continue her work for the Bush transition team, the new president-elect addressed the nation.

After a difficult election, we must put politics behind us and work together to make the promise of America available for every one of our citizens.

I am optimistic that we can change the tone in Washington, D.C. I believe things happen for a reason, and I hope the long wait of the last five weeks will heighten a desire to move beyond the bitterness and partisanship of the recent past.

Our nation must rise above a house divided. Americans share hopes and goals and values far more important than any political disagreements. Republicans want the best for our nation. And so do Democrats. Our votes may differ, but not our hopes.

I know America wants reconciliation and unity. I know Americans want progress. And we must seize this moment and deliver. Together, guided by a spirit of common sense, common courtesy and common goals, we can unite and inspire the American citizens.

I couldn’t sleep that night. Not from bitterness for having had the election stolen by human filth like Karl Rove, but because I, too, shared the President-elect’s vision of a united America, reconciled by our shared dream of a better tomorrow. My optimism that we could put the past behind us and, yes, change the tone lasted the better part of three weeks.

22

I Grow Discouraged About the Tone

The first hint that America was not headed for a golden age of reconciliation and unity of purpose might have been Bush’s nomination of John Ashcroft to be the nation’s chief law enforcement official. A ferocious opponent of a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, a man’s right to choose to have sex with another man, and a third man’s right to choose to film them, Ashcroft was Bush’s sop to the religious right.

By the time the Bush team occupied the White House, it was clear the tone had indeed changed—for the worse. With all the gravity of the Talmudic scholar–cum–Hollywood agent he so closely resembled, press secretary Ari Fleischer addressed a story recently leaked to the Washington Post. Criminal elements within the departing White House staff had committed a despicable outrage at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Referring more in sadness than in anger to the “vandalism,” Fleischer demurred, “I choose not to describe what acts were done that we found upon arrival, because I think that’s part of changing the tone in Washington,” thereby leaving it up to the press corps to imagine shits taken on desks, vomit in filing cabinets,