Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [9]
All the pressure worked on the wimpy, spineless Democrats. They choked. While appearing on Meet the Press, vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman argued that the Democrats should stop creating a fuss and not be bothered that hundreds of military ballots were being counted, just because they weren’t “postmarked.”
Lieberman, like so many others among this new breed of Democrats, should have fought for principle instead of worrying about image. Why? Well, as the New York Times found out:
• 344 ballots had no evidence that they were cast on or before Election Day
• 183 ballots were postmarked in the United States
• 96 ballots lacked appropriate witness information
• 169 ballots came from unregistered voters, had envelopes that weren’t signed properly, or came from people who hadn’t requested a ballot
• 5 ballots came after the November 17 deadline
• 19 overseas voters voted on two ballots—and had both counted
All of these ballots violated Florida law, yet they all were counted. Can I say this any louder? Bush didn’t win! Gore did. It has nothing to do with chads, or even the blatant repression of Florida’s Aftican-American community and their right to vote. It was a simple matter of breaking the law, all documented, all the evidence sitting there in Tallahassee, clearly marked without question—and all done purposefully to throw the election to Bush.
On the morning of Saturday, December 9, 2000, the Supreme Court got word that the recounts in Florida, in spite of everything the Bush camp had done to fix the elections, were going in favor of Al Gore. By 2 Pm., the unofficial tally showed that Gore was catching up to Bush—“only 66 votes down, and gaining!” as one breathless newscaster put it. It was critical to Bush that the words “Al Gore is in the lead” never be heard on American television: With only moments to spare, they did what they had to do. At 2:45 that afternoon, the Supreme Court stopped the recount.
On the Court sat Reagan appointee Sandra Day O’Connor and Nixon appointee Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Both in their seventies, they were hoping to retire under a Republican administration so that their replacements would share their conservative ideology. On election night, O’Connor was heard lamenting at a party in Georgetown that she couldn’t hold out another four—or eight—years. Junior Bush was their only hope for securing a contented retirement in their home state of Arizona.
Meanwhile, two other justices with extremist right-wing viewpoints found themselves with a conflict of interest. justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia Lamp Thomas, worked at the Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank in D.C.; now, she has just been hired by George W. Bush to help recruit people to serve in his impending administration. And Eugene Scalia, the son of justice Antonin Scalia, was a lawyer with the firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher—the very law firm representing Bush before the Supreme Court!
But neither Thomas nor Scalia saw any conflict of interest, and they refused to remove themselves from the case. In fact, when the Court convened later, it was Scalia who issued the now-infamous explanation of why the ballot-counting had to be halted: “The counting of votes that are of questionable legality does, in my view, threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.” In other words, if we let all the votes be counted