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Jewish World Review Nov. 20, 2000 / 22 Mar-Cheshvan 5761
Betsy Hart
The Democrats running the show in Florida are both brilliant and conniving, and they consistently catch Republicans flat-footed. So it was with the hand-recount issue there. Gore campaign chair William Daley evidenced the Gore-camp's thinking when he essentially said two days after the election that any vote total in Florida that did not favor Al Gore wasn't a legitimate outcome. So the question for them was only "where do we get the votes we need to put our guy over the top?" I can't think of anyone better than Daley, son of legendary Chicago Mayor and Democratic machine-runner extraordinaire Richard J. Daley, to suddenly find some extra votes for Al Gore. Voila, the Gore junkyard lawyers came up with the idea of a third, manual count exclusively in a few of the most heavily Democratic counties in the state. And soon they were using subjective, partisan persons instead of objective if imperfect machines to reexamine often unreadable ballots. They employed differing and always changing pregnant/falling/detached "chad" standards to determine the "intent of the voter." So gee, what a surprise that in looking again at votes in precincts that voted 20 and 50 to 1 for Al Gore, holding ballots and squinting at them as we've all seen on our TV screens, they would determine on the all-important third try that more voters really "meant" to vote for Al Gore than were counted the first two times. (Naturally, when the duly elected elections officer in Florida, a Republican, tried to enforce the law and the deadline for the election returns - which the Gore team did not appreciate - they both took her to court and smeared her as being like a "Soviet Commisar.") This conniving caught the Bush team off-guard, and has forced them to pursue their own messy legal action. But it shouldn't have come as a surprise. After all, the Gore camp gave cigarettes to homeless people in Wisconsin to get them to vote; they illegally kept the polls open late in St. Louis to get extra ballots in, and they essentially claimed during the campaign that George W. Bush himself shared some blame in the racially motivated dragging death of James Byrd Jr. and was even more directly responsible for the death of at least one old person in a nursing home in Texas. And they are, of course, the party of Bill Clinton - a president who disgraced his country, committed perjury, was impeached and then wanted an apology from the Republicans for the ordeal. At least Richard Nixon had the grace to resign in shame, something modern-day Democrats have long ago shaken off. But even this pales when one considers that Bill Clinton and Al Gore gleefully took boatloads of illegal campaign cash from the Communist Chinese, while at the same time jumping through hoops to make sure that the Chinese got sensitive nuclear technology they sought. Sure Republicans can play rough, and negative, and they've had some downright unscrupulous leaders. But no one knows how to play lawless, intimidation, hardball politics like these modern-day Democrats. It's easy to see why they do it. By and large, Republicans want to be left alone. Left alone to raise and educate their children, spend their money, run their businesses and their lives as they see fit. Not so today's partisan Democrats. Their agenda is one of controlling others through the means of government, particularly through presidentially appointed judges and regulators, and telling others how to raise and educate their children, spend their money and run their businesses and lives. Appointing partisan judges is particularly important to such liberal Democrats because they can rarely get passed through state legislatures or Congress what they can get forced through courts: Whether it's gun control, abortion on demand, keeping religion out of schools, special rights for homosexuals, racial quotas, draconion environmental regulations, forced busing or a host of other issues, liberal Democrats need a coercive government to work their will on an American people that would never vote for such an agenda.
And so no matter how the saga in Florida ends, it will have illustrated once again that
Republicans by-and-large consider government a distasteful necessity, while today's
partisan Democrats too often see it as life support itself. And that's why they, and not
Republicans, are far more likely to beg, borrow, and yes even steal to get control of
11/14/00: A potentially fateful indication of Gore's mindset
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