On Tue, 05 Dec 2000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On Dec 4, [on] . . . the NewsHour wih Jim Lehrer . . .
> former Sen. Danforth said: ". . . we will never know
> who really won in Florida . . . . we will never clearly
> establish that."
>
> . . . this is a lame excuse for the failure to have a complete
> recount, and for not examining the undervote ballots in
> particular. However, this line will become extremely con-
> venient if, after these ballots are examined under the FOI
> law, it turns out that Gore received more votes than W.
This (obviously) isn't an irrational opinion, politically; but *especially*
in/for a forum devoted primarily to matters statistical/mathmatical, what is
"lame" is the apparent failure of the poster more clearly than he evidently has
to examine his . . . well, unexamined premises:
Whether there was/wasn't an "undervote" is factually/politically debatable and
is, above all, a political question affected only minimally by strictly
mathmatical/statistical considerations. More basically in light of the
primary focus of the newsgroups to which he communicated his essentially just
conclusory opinion, one would think that the poster would understand that the
"count" (and "recount") to which he refers is itself primarily a political act
however dispassionate and non-partisanly well-intended the person(s) doing the
counting.
(But of course, in so noting, I am not disputing that the basic
exercise/purpose of the broadcast segment to which the poster refers was to try
to "manufacture legitimacy" by way of myth-making, albeit an especially lame
and, indeed, hypocritical one in light of the further fact each of the former
senators had made clear many times in the past that the very reason they are
_former_ such is, precisely, their well-founded experience/judgment that the
sort of consensus and cooperation for which they nonetheless were arguing was
simply not achievable in the club which, [if one is to believe their own past
statements] for that very reason, they chose to abandon.)
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