On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Matt Grimaldi wrote: > I don't recall anyone calling a fellow listmember a traitor. > IIRC, in the message that prompted this someone said they > thought Bush stole the election.
Yes and no. It's true that Bush won the recounts, and the post-mortems I've read suggest that Gore could have won only by employing tactics he explicitly rejected early on: either calling for a statewide recount, or having party agents work very hard at every polling place to challenge and have discarded as many of his opponents' votes as possible (which the Bush teams did). So, in terms of the legal battles, in can be said that the Bush team won fairly (if you're willing to believe that the Florida government and the Supreme Court behaved properly and in a manner unbiased by party or family loyalties). My anger focuses primarily on the extra-legal tactics used by the Bush team: the use of "protesters" to prevent election officials from performing court-mandated recounts. (I'm also curious as to why police and state troopers weren't keeping the "protesters" at bay.) Imagine that the reverse had happened: what if the democrats had bussed in party recruits from other states and had them storm the offices of Katherine Harris, with the object of preventing her from doing her duty. Those people would have been forcibly ejected by state troopers and thrown in jail, and to this day you'd be hearing about the attempted Democratic coup from conservative pundits, and they'd be right. Maybe there's a less inflammatory word than treason for the Bush team's behavior. There probably is and I just don't know it. But IMO it stands outside the normal gamut of election-law violations because of its explicit use of force and intimidation, not even against voters but against the agents of the state itself. Marvin Long Austin, Texas
