Party Without A Conscience (2000 Election)

Front Page Magazine ^ | December 11, 2000 | David Horowitz

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Party Without A Conscience By David Horowitz FrontPageMagazine.com | December 11, 2000

JUST AFTER THE SUPREME COURT stopped the vote count and effectively delivered the presidency to George W. Bush, an African-American Democrat from Baltimore named Elijah Cummings summed things up for the losing side: “I just find it incredible. It shocks the conscience. Scores of African-Americans and Jews and so many other people have been deprived of their vote being counted. You want to believe that the courts are not politicized but I think the American people have got to begin to wonder what’s going on here.” The fragile bond that makes America’s fractured parts into a communal whole is the belief that the system ultimately works -- that elections go to the candidate with the most votes, and that the courts decide issues of great moment on an impartial basis. From the moment Al Gore broke the most hallowed unwritten rule of American politics -- that the loser concedes on Election Day -- incalculable damage to the body politic and to the civic order of American life was inevitable. It will take generations to register the full negative ramifications of this one greedy and reckless deed. To sum up for the winning side: In one campaign, Al Gore has done more damage to American government than our most lawless president, Bill Clinton, has managed in two administrations.

But Elijah Cummings is also correct. Paranoia - already an ingrained American political style -- is now going to be the rule of the land. “Scores of African-Americans and Jews…have been deprived of their vote being counted,” as Cummings put it. This was an election of a hundred million. But Al Gore chose to open Pandora’s box in just a handful of Democrat-controlled Florida counties, where African-Americans and Jews are prevalent. He did this not to get a fair result, not to see that “every vote is counted,” as he and his minions so hypocritically claimed, but to get the vote he wanted. This is what losing candidates do in banana republics. They refuse to concede; they claim they were robbed. This is what Al Gore did to ours.

Scores of African-Americans in Dade and Palm Beach counties may indeed have been deprived of having their vote counted, as the Congressman said. But just the opposite may also be true, and not only in Florida, but nationwide. According to Pat Caddell, in at least one West Palm Beach County precinct with a heavily African-American population, Bill McCollum, a white bread House impeachment manager and candidate for Senate, outpolled George Bush two to one. Statewide, McCollum ran behind Bush, even among white voters. Is this disparity plausible? Or was there some hanky-panky behind it? To ruin a Bush ballot, all one has to do is punch the Gore hole. Republicans only mobilized 80 poll watchers for a county with 450,000 voters. Black turnout nationwide broke all records, and, in Florida, blacks were a greater percentage of the voter pool than of the population itself -- a fact at odds with the claims of the NAACP and others that there was disenfranchisement of blacks. It raises the question - now that paranoia has become the national rule - of whether those record numbers aren’t themselves an indication of irregularities in the process. In Philadelphia, there are reports that black precincts experienced 70% and even 100% voter turnout. In Florida, at least 2,000 felons, many of them black, voted illegally - thanks perhaps, in part, to the NAACP’s voter drive in the prisons. On the Sunday before Election Day, in Congressman Jay Dickey’s Arkansas district, black preachers told their congregations that there would be no sermon that day. Instead they were all going to the polls, which had been specially (and illegally) opened for the purpose, to cast their votes. Is anyone confused about whom the votes might have been for?

Do we really want to proceed with this? Apparently, Al Gore and the Democrats think so.

During impeachment, I went the extra mile and wrote a column in which I attempted to understand the other side. With a little effort, I was able to see how a Democrat could misunderstand the issue that had ensnared the President as just about sex. Or, at least, could feel that it fell below the bar of impeachable offenses. If you were a Democrat, I concluded, that might seem plausible.

But this? Tearing the veil from a national election and attempting a Chicago-style ballot heist in front of a watching world? Here is what one Democrat with a conscience had to say about Al Gore’s post-election gambit: “I’m a liberal Democrat. I started in Florida politics. I worked for George McGovern. I worked for Jimmy Carter. I’ve worked for Ted Kennedy, Mario Cuomo. Nobody can question, I think, my credentials and my convictions. But I have to tell you, at this point, it’s hard to believe, but my party, the party that [my family has] belonged to since my great-great-grandfather … has become no longer a party of principles, but has been hijacked by a confederacy of gangsters who need to take power by whatever means and whatever canards they can.”

These words were spoken by Patrick Caddell on Chris Matthews’ Hardball, on November 27. Pat Caddell’s vote for Nader was really a protest vote against the Democrat leader Al Gore -- a man who had stolen and debased the party Pat loved. Pat Caddell is a Democrat with a conscience. Is there another?

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An old column more relevant today than when written.

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Old article that sums up why the Republicans will face all sorts of accusations when they win the House AND the Senate.

Thanks Man Bear Pig!

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From the moment Al Gore broke the most hallowed unwritten rule of American politics -- that the loser concedes on Election Day -- incalculable damage to the body politic and to the civic order of American life was inevitable. It will take generations to register the full negative ramifications of this one greedy and reckless deed.

...on billboards all over America. Gore's act fits well in the context of his party -- the Dhimmicrats have been working to establish a single party state at least since the time of Wilson.