Back to the Slime Pit

Just when you think the Democrats have hit rock bottom in their slime pit, they manage to sink even deeper into the muck and mire in which they seem happy to wallow like pigs in their sty.

The current case in point involves the latest voting fiasco in Southern Florida where they have had the gall to point the finger of blame for the primary day foul-up in two Democrat-controlled counties at Republican Governor Jeb Bush.

One of the more endearing qualities of the Democrats is their heartfelt belief that the voters are incorrigibly stupid and can be sold any bill of goods that pops into their heads as a good way to smear Republicans. You know, such as their ongoing attempts to convince the electorate that those villainous Republicans are out to abolish Social Security by looting a trust fund that doesn't exist except on some very flimsy paper – the trust fund the Socialist Democrats have been looting for years to pay for their various Marxist schemes.

The public is catching on to these sleazy tactics, but that doesn't stop them from creating all sorts of new deceptions they hope the public will swallow whole. So when Democrat-infested Miami-Dade and Broward counties mess up the voting, they jump up and down and hoot and holler and blame the dastardly Republicans.

Janet Reno, who got narrowly beaten by a political unknown, immediately complained that her voters were prevented from voting, or were unable to use the voting machines, and the cause of all of this, of course, was Jeb Bush.

When the most corrupt attorney general in American history has the gall to blame her troubles on a Republican governor when anything that went wrong was totally and completely the fault of the election officials of the two counties who happen to be, guess what, her fellow Democrats, you get an idea how low these people can sink when they put their twisted minds to it.

That takes what New Yorkers, who largely populate Miami-Dade and Broward counties, would call "chutzpah" – the expressive Yiddish way of saying unmitigated gall.

Think about it. There are 67 counties in Florida and 65 of them managed to get it right, on the whole. Only two turned it into a farce – Miami-Dade and Broward, two of the four counties that were the focus of Al Gore's undisguised attempt to steal the state's 27 electoral votes – two counties chock-full of Democrat election officials.

Now, as a resident of Palm Beach County, another of the infamous four caught up in the great Gore vote robbery, I am aware of the fact that the nation tends to see us South Floridians as a bunch of idiots who can't even manage the simple act of voting – that we are apt to vote for too many or too few or even none of the candidates on the ballot.

In the year 2000, it was punch cards and hanging chads and overvotes and undervotes. This time around, the problem was more sophisticated – we had computers which have touch screens and were supposed to be so easy to deal with that even all of us dunderheads could handle the process of casting votes.

In Palm Beach County, much to my surprise, that turned out to be true. Theresa LePore, the county's much-imposed-upon supervisor of elections, showed up at my parish church one Sunday a few months ago to demonstrate how to use her dandy new computerized iVotronics voting gadget.

I asked her if she thought that this thing would eliminate all of the problems our voters seem to have in casting ballots. She said sure it would. I told her it wouldn't.

But she kept toting the thing around, showing up at the drop of a hat at any affair that attracted more than two potential voters and showing people how it worked, and by golly, thanks to her dogged persistence, on primary day we had a minimum of problems.

Theresa insists she is neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and in observing her and the agony she's had to endure, I have come to the conclusion that we should stop electing people to this office and allow judges to sentence murderers and rapists and other such felons to serve life terms as supervisors of elections – although the Supreme Court would probably rule that this would constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

Anyway, back to Janet Reno and her fellow Socialist Democrats and their chutzpah in blaming Jeb Bush for the voting problems last Tuesday. One of the reasons these people think they can get away with this kind of slimy behavior is their belief, usually justified, that the liberal socialist Democrat media will avert their gaze and ignore their blatant miscreance.

This time they figured wrong. Many of the state's newspapers took after them with hammer and tong. Even such bastions of liberal Democrat orthodoxy as the St. Petersburg Times and the Tampa Tribune couldn't stomach the Democrat attempts to blame the governor.

A headline in the Tribune said it all : "Blaming Jeb for Voting Mess Is a Pitiful Democratic Deceit."

The paper went on to say: "Though there may have been some trouble with the machinery itself, it seems more likely now that minimally trained poll workers unintentionally caused many of the problems. The machines apparently recorded the votes, but because of human error, the tally reported to the state was incomplete.

"Moreover, as has been amply reported, some people were turned away from polling places that opened late. Many precincts were not ready for the voters.

"The supervisors of elections in both counties have egg on their face. But who is getting the blame?

"Both McBride and Reno have said as much: Because the election was held 'on his watch,' it's his fault.

"Baloney. To blame Bush, who signed an election reform package that provided millions to help the counties make the reforms, is absurd. And wholly about politics. And voters know it.

"Democrats control Broward and Miami-Dade counties. And if any one person is to blame for the troubles in either place, it would be the elections supervisor in charge. Neither Miriam Oliphant in Broward nor David Leahy in Miami-Dade spent enough time recruiting and training poll workers. And both waited too long to buy the hardware and have it delivered."

This McBride guy, the lawyer who beat Janet Reno, should know better. He's an ex-Marine, for heaven's sakes. He's running on a platform promising to improve the state's schools – an interesting claim given that he is the hand-picked, lavishly financed candidate of the Florida teachers unions and the National Education Association (NEA), the very people who have wrecked Florida's schools.

Expecting a man as thoroughly beholden to the educrats as Bill McBride to undo the mess the NEA has created in America's schools would be like expecting a Mafia don to solve the problem of organized crime.

Anyway, I'll leave the final words about South Florida's primary day to South Florida's Dave Barry, who noted in the Miami Herald that you can't really expect much from the people who make the iVotronic voting contraption when they don't even understand the basic rules of capitalization.

"And so once again, South Florida is making life easy for Leno and Letterman," Barry wrote. "What is the solution? How can we avoid being international laughingstocks in the next election?"

"My suggestion – call me crazy - is that we print the ballot on paper, with a box next to each candidate's name. We instruct the voters to put an 'X' in their candidate's box. Then we have human beings count the 'X's, and the candidate with the most votes wins. I realize this is a radical system, but I believe that it would be difficult for even South Floridians to screw it up.

"We could get our elections over within a single day, like everybody else, and we would have more time to enjoy the pleasures of South Florida. Such as scuba diving. On our new artificial reef.

Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute.

"hand-picked, lavishly financed candidate of the Florida teachers unions and the National Education Association (NEA), the very people who have wrecked Florida's schools."

How can you wreck something that never worked. I had a cute little cheerleader girlfriend from FLA who moved north. She was a straight A student down south, but the school system caught on and tested students for "placement".

She was demoted one year, placed in remedial reading, and barely managed C's (some weren't even C's) Her sister did better, no demotion, just more work for lower grades.

No student coming in from the south ever did better than about a B average, most less.

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