Al Gore's Greatest Hits
December 1, 2000
Toogood Reports
On the morning of November 8—now known as Election Day 2, Vice-President Al Gore conceded the presidential election to Gov. George W. Bush. And then he called back Gov. Bush, and un-conceded. Gore has been unconceding ever since.
Al Gore keeps on saying he’ll concede once the votes are counted showing George Bush the winner, yet each time the Governor is declared the winner, the Vice President merely refuses to concede all over again.
Gore is beginning to resemble the mad knight in the movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In each of four rounds of dueling, his opponent lops off one of the mad knight’s limbs, but the now armless and legless warrior demands yet another go at it, even calling his opponent a “coward,” as the latter leaves his screaming torso in the forest.
On November 18th (Election Day 12), when Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris sought to certify the original Florida election results, Gore again refused to concede. Gore enjoyed the complicity of an outlaw Florida Supreme Court (FSC), which nullified Florida election law, in the form of the deadline for the certification of election results.
Then, when Democratic operatives in Florida were unable to fabricate votes fast enough for the new deadline imposed by the FSC, they “requested” that Secretary Harris extend the deadline once more. Again, she declined, which was her prerogative under the law.
And so, while adhering to an illegal deadline that had been forced upon her, and including illegal votes that had been added via fraud since the original machine-counting election night, and one legal, machine-recount following Election Day, Secretary Harris certified George W. Bush the winner of the Florida presidential election, and thus president-elect of these United States, on Sunday, November 26th (Election Day 20).
This time, the margin of error was only 537 votes, but it might as well have been 53,700. Vice President Gore had his running mate, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, give a non-concession speech on national television:
From the beginning of this extraordinary period of time, Vice President Gore and I have asked only that the votes that were cast on Election Day be counted. This evening, the secretary of state of Florida has decided to certify what by any reasonable standard is an incomplete and inaccurate count of the votes cast in the State of Florida....
What is at issue here is nothing less than every American’s simple, sacred right to vote. How can we teach our children that every vote counts if we are not willing to make a good faith effort to count every vote?
The next evening (November 27, aka Election Day 21), on prime-time TV—just before Monday Night Football—against a backdrop of twelve American flags, Gore read another non-concession speech:
If the people do not in the end choose me, so be it. The outcome will have been fair, and the people will have spoken. If they choose me, so be it. I would then commit and do commit to bringing this country together. But, whatever the outcome, let the people have their say, and let us listen.
A vote is not just a piece of paper. A vote is a human voice, a statement of human principle, and we must not let those voices be silenced—not for today, not for tomorrow, not for as long as this nation’s laws and democratic institutions let us stand and fight to let those voices count....
Ignoring votes means ignoring democracy itself. If we ignore the votes of thousands in Florida in this election, how can you or any American have confidence that your vote will not be ignored in a future election? That is all we have asked since Election Day, a complete count of all the votes cast in Florida—not recount after recount, as some have charged, but a single full and accurate count. We haven’t had that yet....
This is America. When votes are cast, we count them. We don’t arbitrarily set them aside because it’s too difficult to count them.
In listening to the Vice President and his supporters, I’m reminded of Mary McCarthy’s immortal line to Stalinist playwright and “memoirist” Lillian Hellman, about thirty years ago on The Dick Cavett Show:
Every word you say is a lie, including “and” and “the.”
On Wednesday, November 29th, Vice-President Gore gave multiple “exclusive” interviews on broadcast and cable TV networks. In one “exclusive” interview that day with CNN’s John King, Gore pretty much recited his standard script:
You know, the only way to avoid having a cloud over the next president is to count all the votes.... But a higher obligation still, is the obligation I have to the Constitution and to the country to insist that the election have integrity.
How about by starting with Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which states:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
By the time of the CNN interview, Gore had already threatened the Florida legislature, which was planning on meeting the following week to name a slate of electors.
Vice-President Gore’s strategy has been to continually repeat a handful of lies, the biggest of which is that “thousands of votes” have not been counted. These votes do not exist. All of the votes that were cast in election booths on Election Day were counted by machine, re-counted by machine, and in many cases, manually recounted. That makes as many as three countings, i.e., three Bush victories. That’s not including an undetermined number of absentee votes the Gore people had thrown out, often for contradictory reasons. At this writing, the Gore camp is trying to get additional thousands of absentee ballots from heavily Republican precincts thrown out.
When he speaks of “thousands of uncounted votes,” the Vice-President is usually talking about 10,000 ballots in Miami-Dade County. Mr. Gore insists that such “undervotes” would net him hundreds of additional votes over the “undervotes” that would presumably accrue to his opponent.
How does he know this? Gore speaks always as if he KNEW how many votes were waiting for him.
In fact, none of those 10,000 “undervotes” would accrue to Gore, because there ARE NO “undervotes.”
The ballots in question are from people who voted in other races on Election Day, but who chose NOT to vote for president. Their proportion of the vote in Miami-Dade County, 1.6 percent, was actually LOWER than that of half of Florida’s other 66 counties. The rates of presidential non-votes in the entire states of Idaho and Wyoming (5 and 3.6 percent), were 212 and 125 percent higher, respectively, and in the populous state of Illinois, the rate of “undervoting” was 144 percent higher than in Florida. Yet, we do not hear of thousands of votes “not being counted” in those states. The phrase “undervotes” is cut from the same racial-socialist cloth that, lacking any evidence, calls poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods “underserved,” as a euphemism for “victimized by racial discrimination,” despite a lack of evidence of discrimination.
The Vice President is concerned with divining the “intent” of these “undervoters.”
In a democratic election, you don’t “divine” a voter’s “intent.” Either the voter’s decision is transparent, or you disqualify the vote. If you are going to give some people the power of “interpreting” the voter’s or the people’s will, then you have effectively canceled the election.
A nation that would permit the divining of dimples might have some meaningless ritual that it calls an “election,” just as the Soviet Union and its satellites used to, but it will be a mockery of a democratic election.
Another way to make a mockery of a democratic election, is to petition a judge, as Al Gore has petitioned Florida circuit court Judge N. Sanders Sauls, to simply overturn the election, and declare Gore the winner, and thus the president-elect, by fiat.
The Illinois Supreme Court justices, in the 1990 case of Pullen v. Mulligan which lead Gore attorney David Boies lied about to the Florida Supreme Court, spoke of “reasonable certainty,” and did not even address “dimpled” or “pregnant,” as opposed to “hanging” (“partially punctured”) chads. That is because neither of the litigants, themselves candidates in an electoral race initially declared a tie, had the gall to try and sell a judge on counting as votes chads which had not at all been perforated.
But that was in the pre-Clinton era. We’ve come a long way, baby!
Meanwhile, we don’t hear anymore about the thousands of military absentee ballots that five Democratic lawyers had thrown out. Sensing a public relations nightmare, Democratic Party officials all changed their tune, calling for the counting of the military votes, but I am not aware that all of those ballots were, indeed, counted.
In a rarely-reported story, Democratic lawyers also got many local absentee ballots in heavily Republican areas thrown out. One Republican voter found out too late, that a Democratic operative had insisted that the signature on his ballot did not match the one on his application, and had thrown out the ballot, even though the same man had signed both documents.
As a result of such chicanery, and the conjuring of over 1,200 “divined” ballots since Election Day for Al Gore, I am convinced that George Bush’s true margin of victory should be 2,000-5,000 votes.
Some members of the media have soured on Gore. In New York on November 29, an NBC News reporter spoke of Gore’s “spin,” with which he must persuade people that he has won the election.
And yet, the racial-socialist mainstream media is still churning out pro-Gore propaganda—essentially regurgitating his standard non-concession speech—by hack journalists, and op-eds and letters from tenured, racial-socialist professors from all over the country.
A fairly typical journalistic hack piece, “Right-Wingers Praise Antics of Bush Thugs,” by unofficial Gore spokesman Joe Conason, appeared in the New York Observer, on November 29, aka Election Day 23.
Rather than accept the decision of that state’s highest legal authority to reconcile contradictory statutes in favor of ensuring that every ballot counts, the Bush campaign disparaged the integrity of the seven honorable judges, encouraged obstruction of their orders, and even organized a brief but violent assault on the Miami-Dade County officials who were attempting to comply with the court’s decision.... Meanwhile, Mr. Bush has yet to explain why he signed an election law in Texas that provides for manual re-counting of punch-card ballots, dimpled and otherwise — and why he thinks that law should be observed in his home state but flouted in his brother’s state.
Seven honorable judges? Recall, that these are the six Democratic Party hacks and one “independent” who violated Florida election law, in striking down the statutory certification deadline of November 18, which they illegally extended to November 26th.
As for the Texas law, it was already on the books BEFORE the election, and applies to only five percent of the state’s districts. However, the Texas law is utterly irrelevant to Florida, which has no such law.
Conason’s twisted logic is like that of Gore lawyer David Boies, who, because Democratic election supervisors in Florida’s Broward County committed the outrage of counting as votes ballots with “dimples,” “marks,” or “indentations,” demanded that all other counties imitate Broward.
As for the “violent assault on the Miami-Dade County officials,” no matter how many times those officials—all of whom are Democrats—led by election canvassing board chairman David Leahy, deny that any such assault took place, Conason & Co. keep on repeating the lie.
In a similar vein, the November 29 San Diego Union-Tribune ran an op-ed, “10 Reasons Bush Should Concede,” by Steven Semararo and Teresa Gillis. Semeraro is an assistant professor of law, and Gillis is a former professor of law, from San Diego’s Thomas Jefferson School of Law.
• 10. “Gore received over 300,000 more votes than Bush nationwide”;
• 9. Since “Putting Florida aside, Gore has significantly more electoral votes than Bush (267 to 246), and in Florida, the men “are essentially tied,” Florida’s electoral votes should be split, giving Gore a 279 to 259 margin;
• 8. Rather than having changed the rules after the election, the Florida Supreme Court “simply cited a statute that unequivocally requires handcounts when errors in a machine count might affect the result”;
• 7. The Florida Supreme Court “has held that hand counts are more accurate than machines”;
• 6. Dimpled chads are by law admissible in Texas, determining voter intent is a straightforward process, and between Palm Beach and “the 10,000 uncounted votes in Miami-Dade counties” [sic], Gore would win by more than 1,000 votes”;
• 5. Based on statistical models, about 2,000 out of Pat Buchanan’s 3,000 Palm Beach County votes were “intended for Gore”;
• 4. In Seminole County, 4,000-odd Republican absentee ballots were rejected, and then reinstated after “Republican operatives” filled in missing information on them;
• 3. Most of the 19,000 “double-punched Gore-Buchanan ballots in Palm Beach County were likely votes for Gore;”
• 2. Since Bush refused Gore’s generous offer to hand recount the entire state, Bush and the Republicans must know that they lost the state;
• 1. “Two words — popular vote.”
The first thing that springs to the eye is that these two legal eagles promised ten reasons, but provided only nine.
Numbers ten and one are two ways of saying the same thing. These guys sound like Democrat manual vote-counters! [Postscript, June 26, 2010: Numbers five and three are also two ways of saying the same thing; thus, Semararo and Gillis provided only eight separate reasons.]
If the authors read the U.S. Constitution, they’d know that the popular vote is irrelevant to the issue of determining an election. If they read Florida law, they’d know that delegate splitting is illegal. And even if it were legal, again, what reason would Bush have to hand over his victory to the man he beat? If we’re going to contemplate such nonsense, why not suggest that Al Gore split electors that he won in close races in Wisconsin, Iowa, New Mexico and elsewhere with George Bush?
Since no proof was provided that the voting machines (as opposed to voters) were malfunctioning, the law’s hand-count provision is also irrelevant.
As for the Florida Supreme Court’s opinions on accuracy, the less said, the better.
Semeraro and Gillis mention “the 10,000 uncounted votes in Miami-Dade counties” [sic] in reasons seven and six, but as I explained, no such batch of uncounted votes exists in Miami-Dade. The only batch of uncounted votes that may still exist would be suspected Republican absentee ballots.
And then we have the fuzzy math of “statistical models” and likely Gore voters, which is a dodge, whereby Semeraro and Gillis try to feign real knowledge, where they have none.
Gore’s offer of a statewide recount came after the deadline for formally making such requests, and the request was the prerogative of the loser, not the winner. Besides, why would someone certified to have won a race voluntarily backtrack from his own victory?
Semeraro and Gillis did come up with one major problem for Bush—the Seminole County ballot applications (not the ballots themselves—they got that wrong, too).
A Seminole County election official reportedly helped Republican absentee voters, by filling in missing information on their ballot applications, but not Democrat absentee voters. Seminole County is the one thing that could potentially cost George Bush the presidency, if things drag out long enough for it to come up in a court of law.
And yet, George W. Bush could also launch investigations into charges of illegal alien voting, and the documented case of a Democratic Party activist bribing homeless people with cigarettes to get them to vote in Milwaukee, and God knows where else.
In Florida, Haitian voters have charged that Creole-speaking Democrats inside polling places told them to vote for Gore, and stuffed pieces of paper with instructions for voting the straight Democratic line in their hands, all of which, if true, were cases of criminal behavior.
And since the election, a stack of affidavits by manual recount observers have attested to floors littered with chads, a chad taped back onto a Bush vote, and Bush votes placed in “Gore” piles. Examining a “vote” for Gore, Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Democrat, saw nothing. No dimple. Kerrey had to leave, to avoid a moral dilemma.
Al Gore does not intend to concede the Presidency. Ever.
Some people have speculated that the Vice-President is mentally ill. So what else is new?
For the past eight years, we have been ruled by two sociopaths, one elected, and one that came as part of a “two-for-one, blue-plate special.” And the originally unelected ruler has since gained election to national office.
Vice-President Gore’s refusal to concede the election appears to me to be a case of his imitating the sort of lawless behavior he has witnessed on a regular basis (and occasionally perpetrated) for the past eight years, as a member of the most criminal administration in our nation’s history. And he saw that the more crimes Bill Clinton was discovered to have committed, the higher Clinton’s popularity rose. And if Gore loses now, it’s all over.
After holding an election hostage for almost one month, there’s no “graceful” way for Al Gore to concede. And in 2004, HILLARY! plans on sweeping him out of her way. She may already have the sort of “persuasive” material on Al that Gore’s operatives—led by Bob Beckel—have been collecting on Republican electors to “help” them change their minds.
An anonymous Internet poster at the Free Republic message board imagined Al Gore suddenly knocking President Bush out of the way at the latter’s inauguration, and putting his own hand on The Bible.
That’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.
It’s starting to look as though Mr. Gore may have to be detained during the Inauguration, whether by federal marshals, or by men in white coats wielding a butterfly net. Otherwise, he just might not be able to contain himself.
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