Posted on 11/27/2001 2:13:23 PM PST by Timesink
Floridocracy: Gore, Florida, and Democracy Held Hostage
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 22, 2001
DEMOCRATS HAVE LONG DEPENDED on liberal judges to impose from the bench what the Left could not win at the ballot box.
During 36 days last November and December, Democrats took this tactic to a terrifying new level. They attempted repeatedly to use Democrat-appointed judges and media allies to carry out a coup d’etat, to remove duly elected George W. Bush and install Al Gore as President of the United States.
The coup plotters failed after holding America hostage for more than five weeks, but only because the U.S. Supreme Court was willing to trump that of Florida.
Now, as Mr. Gore reenters the public stage to begin jousting for the 2004 Democratic Presidential nomination – and after subjective "recounts" by the liberal media have quietly confirmed Bush’s victory – comes Washington Times Senior White House Correspondent and Fox News Channel political analyst Bill Sammon with a brilliant book that, if read by every American, would force Al Gore and the Democratic Party to kiss their aspirations for future power good-bye.
Fact by shocking fact, Sammon cuts through the smoke, mirrors, and propaganda to bring what happened in Florida into clear-eyed focus. Sammon is a soft-spoken, careful reporter, but he has skill and toughness honed from reporting corruption in his native Cleveland for The Plain Dealer and in Balkan war zones for The Stars and Stripes.
Most reporters, when promoted to a Washington, D.C., position at the knee of those in power, turn from watchdogs into lapdogs. The Leftist establishment has lots of goodies, such as exclusive interviews and inside scoops, with which to reward reporters who go along to get along, who skew their stories to favor Democrats. In a capital where 89 percent of a journalist’s peers are Democrats, reporters are expected to serve as megaphones for the Left and as critics of Republicans. The usual road to wealth and career advancement curves to the left, and woe unto reporters who refuse to bend a la gauche.
To his credit, Sammon has the courage, integrity, and individualism not to be seduced into joining the herd of journalist sheep on this crooked road. His reputation as a straight shooter sometimes even moves the liberal establishment press towards honest reporting.
Sammon, for example, broke the story of Gore’s own "Watergate," a press photo op in which the Vice President was to be pictured as an environmentalist canoeing down the Connecticut River. Sammon’s nose for news detected that in drought-stricken New England, while citizens were prohibited from watering their lawns, Gore’s advance team had arranged for the dumping of half a billion gallons of stored water – enough to flush a majority of all toilets in America – to raise the river so their boating boss would not scrape his bottom.
Sammon’s exposé was echoed by The New York Times and other establishment media, much to Gore’s embarrassment and anger. Gore might not have ordered this waste of water, but Sammon knew that the Vice President had been told about it immediately afterwards. Gore, however, to him later denied any knowledge of what had been done.
Gore’s general hypocrisy was no secret, but Sammon introduces his book with a larger lesson from this incident. "When caught in a jam," writes Sammon, "[Gore] reflexively resorted to deception…. He also made it his practice to dispatch staffers to attack the messenger and anyone else who dared question the message of the day."
Sammon’s fast-paced analysis puts a human face on the attempted Florida coup, starting with Florida panhandle businessman Bob Glass. Glass was a Bush enthusiast who worked hard to get out the vote for the Texas governor on election day. But, like at least 10,000 other panhandle Republicans, after hearing the networks announce that Gore had won Florida – projections made while the polls were still open in this western Central Time Zone part of the state – Glass went home in despair and cast no vote.
Why did the networks declare Gore the winner? Sammon provides chilling evidence of network Leftist bias, as well as a mix of bias and incompetence in Voter News Service polling on which the networks depended. He documents, too, that Associated Press polling contradicted VNS and showed Bush winning Florida by, at one point, 150,000 votes – but the reliable AP polling went unreported by the networks.
Sammon documents a systematic pattern by the networks of immediately crediting states won by Gore while declaring "too close to call" many states that Bush was winning decisively. I vividly remember Judy Woodruff of CNN, the Clinton News Network, with her eyes downcast looking like a shamefaced little girl caught lying as she told viewers that Virginia and Georgia were "too close to call." Her colleague Jeff Greenfield – never identified to the audience as a former Bobby Kennedy operative – opined that this was bad news for Bush, that Georgia was a state Bush "should have won goin’ away." In fact, Bush did.
This deliberate slanting of results was being broadcast while three-fourths of America’s populace was still voting, while in California people were just getting off work and heading to the polls – or, like Glass, were deciding to head home instead. Such dishonest calls by Gore-friendly networks easily cost Bush more votes nationwide than Gore now claims as the margin of his "popular vote" victory.
The networks had agreed not to project winners in any state until its polls closed, but they declared Florida – the state on which they had told viewers the election would hinge – won by Gore while its western polling places were still open. Was this an accident? Not likely, notes Sammon, because the then-obscure Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris had sent memos to all networks and the Voter News Service reminding them that much of Florida was on Central, not Eastern time. Gore, Sammon shows, later directly ordered his apparatchiks to smear Harris personally in an effort to destroy her credibility with the public.
Sammon provides shocking details of the coup, including many only half-understood even by news junkies. He lays out how Democrats used a polling firm to create doubts about the "Butterfly Ballot" designed by a Democrat in West Palm Beach. He analyzes the ever-shifting standards for counting chads by Democrat-controlled canvassing boards. He documents how Florida’s Attorney General had a conflict of interest intervening in the election process, being also Gore’s state campaign manager. And he goes farther, showing that AG Robert Butterworth had no legal jurisdiction in the process – yet the media never reported the impropriety of Butterworth’s maneuvers to help Gore.
Bob Beckel, who headed Democrat Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign in 1984, agreed that the early network calls for Gore cost Bush at least 8,000 Florida votes. But as Sammon describes, this did not stop Beckel from trying to persuade Bush electors to violate their pledges and cast Electoral College votes for Gore. "’I’m trying to kidnap electors,’ Beckel announced to Neil Cavuto of Fox News Channel…. ‘Whatever it takes.’" Some feared that, like Clinton-inspired sex revelations about Republican congressmen, Beckel’s probes into elector backgrounds was looking for fodder for blackmail. In a Gore coup attempt full of dirty tricks, many thought this among the dirtiest.
Sammon brings us up close and personal with Navy Lieutenant John Russell, on duty in the Middle East, who helped rescue the terrorist-attacked U.S.S. Cole. We learn of his patriotic sacrifices to safeguard democracy for all of us. And then Sammon details how Gore lawyers had Lt. Cole’s absentee ballot thrown out for lack of a postmark, even though the election board had date-stamped it as received the day before the election. Having used such technicalities in one county to destroy the votes of 149 Americans in uniform, writes Sammon, "a pair of jubilant Gore lawyers exchanged high-fives."
"A Republican, visibly shaken by this sight," writes Sammon, "demanded to know how they could celebrate the disenfranchisement of U.S. military members risking their lives around the world. One of the Gore lawyers glibly replied: ‘A win’s a win.’" Gore months earlier had told an aide "I’ll do anything to win," and that "anything" evidently including shooting down Americans in uniform so he could become Commander-in-Chief.
The Democratic Party’s search-and-destroy operation against military absentee ballots disqualified 1,420 votes cast by Florida soldiers, sailors, and airmen serving America. Gore goons later also tried, but failed, to use Democrat judges to throw out thousands of Bush votes in two counties. And as this went on, Gore hypocritically kept repeating his slogan that he wanted "every vote counted."
But despite such efforts, Bush won the initial count of votes, the second count of votes, and the absentee vote. The only thing that could keep Gore’s ambitions alive then happened. The Florida Supreme Court, all seven of whose members were Leftists and Democrat appointees, intervened to block certification of Bush as the winner. This action, by which these Justices usurped the authority of the legislature, would later be overturned as unconstitutional by the unanimous vote of all nine Justices, liberal and conservative, of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Sammon reveals a detail about this that the Leftist media has suppressed. The Florida Supreme Court heard arguments, including that by Gore attorney David Boies using a "fake affidavit" from Chicago, and made a show of questioning both sides. But Republican lawyers learned that the Florida high court’s decision had been completely written before arguments began; they had in advance precise details of how many pages it would be and how it would find in Gore’s favor. The Florida Supreme Court behaved in Alice-in-Wonderland, "first the verdict, then the trial," fashion from the outset to make Gore president.
After being slapped down once by the U.S. Supreme Court, the four most extreme Leftist Florida Justices defied the constitutions of Florida and the United States again, adding illegal and non-existent votes to Gore’s total and ordering a capricious statewide vote recount to keep the Democrat standard-bearer’s coup alive. This was too much even for three Florida Justices. "The prolonging of judicial process in this counting contest propels this country and this state into an unprecedented and unnecessary constitutional crisis," dissented Chief Justice Charles T. Wells. "There is a real and present likelihood that this constitutional crisis will do substantial damage to our country, our state, and to this court as an institution."
Bush attorney Ted Olson – now himself the target of vengeful Leftist smears intended to derail his nomination to be Solicitor General – argued that if the Florida high court ruling prevailed, then "The judiciary in every state…could overturn, rewrite, revise and change the election law in presidential elections, notwithstanding Article II [of the U.S. Constitution], at will."
Seven of nine U.S. Supreme Court Justices agreed that the ongoing Florida recount was unconstitutional. Even Clinton-Gore appointee and Gore personal friend Stephen Breyer held that to be constitutional any recount required uniform standards, not the whim of each person counting as to whether a chad had been dimpled. Five of the nine Justices also ruled that the counting violated the "Equal Protection" clause of the Constitution.
But "Democrats and the press stubbornly refused to portray the Supreme Court’s ruling as a 7-to-2 decision," writes Sammon. Their apparent goal, he surmises, was to create a "myth" that Gore’s victory had been stolen by a scant majority of five conservative Supreme Court Justices. This myth would be used to mobilize Democratic voters and de-legitimize the Bush Presidency.
Sammon’s impressive book focuses on the five weeks during which Gore, by holding our politics hostage, "was unquestionably the most powerful person in the United States." Sammon does not discuss pre-election schemes, such as the Clinton-Gore effort to make it more difficult for military people to vote. Neither does he discuss whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s narrow rulings leave the door open for smarter state judges to manipulate elections. Future presidential candidates might need to hold back half their funds for post-election legal battles in which judges, not voters, would decide the winner. Call it Floridocracy.
Bill Sammon’s excellent dissection of what happened in Florida could inoculate America against Floridocracy infections of our body politic. Read this book to give yourself a healthy understanding of how black-robed terrorists at the dawn of this Millennium almost overthrew our Constitution. And buy copies for your children and grandchildren to strengthen their political immune defenses.
YES!! This drives me nuts! It is amazing how this most important fact is constantly omitted from any post election exam. If he would have won his own home state, he would be president...he is the first candidate for president that didn't win his own state since, I think, 1842, or '49. If memory serves, he did not win Arkansas either.
The national press didn't seem to listen to any of Bush's speeches, except to wait for a "gotcha" and then they played that over and over.
Recently on Imus, Howard Feinman called President Bush (in a manner praising his take-charge leadership) a "red-neck Texan." He said that the press had emphasized Bush's Andover, Yale and Harvard background too much during the campaign. They are slow, but they are finally getting it.
OTOH, "Waaaaa, Mommy, he cheated" is the other.
Good grief, Ceci Connolly portrayed as the anti-gore????? Beam me up, Scotty!
I can't wait to read the replies to this post. Ususally I read first, then comment. Not tonight, this is too incredible!
I've canoed in that area before and it is a chronic problem that one can never be quite sure what the water level would be and exactly when the dams would release water. In my case, my party ended up having to push canoes over and across river bottom rocks for much of 10 or so miles.
I would guess that the Gore party faced similar concerns and more: any time a candidate or official is stuck out in the open for any significant length of time, he or she becomes a sitting duck target. So the normal suggestion that the Gore party just wait it out was no more practical for him than for anyone else with a time and money budget. I don't buy the argument that the Gore campaign was innocent, though. Someone should have thought through the consequences with some obvious application of logic and either avoided or handled the issue in a less politically sensitive manner. The essence of the problem was the Gore got preferential treatment to the detriment of others and the environment, and the first people that should have raised the alarm are those who were most familiar with such concerns: environmentalists and outdoor adventurers, such as the Sierra Club and the Appalachian Mountain Club folks.
The author IMHO chose a weak argument with which to open his article.
Hmmmmm.....is that your feet I smell....
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