| Commentators are wringing their hands with consternation over whether the nation can heal. That is the wrong question. The question is whether Al Gore and his forces will ever lay down their arms. Wounds cannot heal when they are constantly being re-injured.
It is immensely ironic that the candidate who has caused all this post-election discord is the one asserting victimhood. For Al Gore to plead injury at the hands of George Bush is like Bill Clinton claiming that he was the victim of Ken Starr, Linda Tripp and Willard, for that matter.
When you think about it, Gore has been given innumerable opportunities to change the outcome of the election, yet he says he's the one who has been cheated. I wonder if he acted like this on the school playground. Just think of all the unwarranted advantages Gore has received. Gore is the one who:
benefited when the pro-Gore media prematurely called the race in his favor, discouraging untold thousands of Bush supporters from voting in Florida and elsewhere;
got an automatic recount because the election was so close, and still lost;
persuaded a few heavily Democratic counties to conduct a full manual recount when they were clearly unauthorized by law to do so because the partial manual recount revealed no machine error;
coerced (through threats of lawsuits) a few other heavily Democratic counties to proceed with manual recounts, even though they had decided not to do so;
received the benefit of at least one of those counties changing every imaginable rule in midstream to count every questionable ballot -- and then some -- for Gore;
systematically torpedoed absentee military ballots statewide because he knew they would favor Bush.
was unable to convince a Democratic circuit judge to change the Florida law to force the Secretary of State to accept late-filed returns; but
conned the Democratic Florida Supreme Court into unconstitutionally changing the Florida election law after the election to establish a new deadline for the Secretary of State to accept returns;
was still trailing after all of these gifts;
has friends who are unconscionably trying to interfere with Bush's pledged presidential electors;
couldn't hoodwink two Democratic circuit judges into disqualifying thousands of absentee ballots in Seminole and Martin counties for technical reasons;
couldn't convince another Democratic circuit judge that he'd sustained his legal burden of proof in multifarious election contest cases; but
was given another temporary reprieve by four rabid activist Florida Supreme Court justices when they disregarded the order of the United States Supreme Court and removed yet another deadline -- their own deadline -- and ordered statewide partial recount anarchy. In doing so, the Florida Court completely obliterated its state's election contest law in trying to bestow victory on its ideological soulmate.
Gore has had everything handed to him on a silver platter, and still hasn't been able to scrounge up sufficient votes to surpass president-elect Bush. But he's still trying.
After all this exhausting indulgence, Gore and his media enablers are bellyaching that some 9,000 "undervotes" still have not been counted. Keep in mind that Democratic Miami-Dade County made its own decision not to resume the manual recount of those votes because they couldn't meet even the extended deadline established by the Florida Supremes.
Probably the greatest Gore myth of this saga -- and that is some tall order -- is the assertion that these 9,000 ballots have been improperly ignored. Please understand this: the tabulation machines rejected those ballots because they were supposed to reject those ballots. They were not ignored by accident. The voters did not follow the directions to punch fully through the chads, and therefore did not convert their ballots into legal votes. That is the law as it existed in Florida on the day of the election. Of all the rule breaking advocated by the Gore team, this one is the poisonous tree corrupting so much post-election fruit.
Now, tell me, who's the victim here? But just look at the contrasting, post-election presidential demeanor of president-elect George Bush, who's taken it on the chin at almost every turn. Isn't it enormously gratifying and refreshing to know that in a little over a month we are going to have a statesman occupying the White House again? I, for one, can hardly wait. |