This California Redwood tree was and still is more animated and lively than Al Gore was on the campaign trail in 2000!

He ran a really lousy campaign and then he expected the Florida and US Supreme Courts to deliver to him an Electoral win by demanding a recount effort in only four heavily Democratic Florida counties instead of recounting the entire state. 

A compliant—if not complicit—Florida court tried to assist him by making up their state law along the way in the infamous 2000 recount and finally the US Supreme Court ruled logically and lawfully that the fiasco that became the Florida recount was a violation of the 14^th Amendment’s ‘equal protections clause’ and the former Vice-President and even more former once very conservative US Senator from Tennessee—Albert Gore Jr—was indeed defeated for the US presidency by George W Bush. 

Yes, it has been 10 years since Gore v Bush—seems like yesterday—and it seems that tomorrow is blurrier than at any other time in our history too. 

After the 2000 election, Florida changed it’s motto from the Sunshine State to the ‘Dangling penis without any balls state’!

It was a whole and a constitutional ruling because of the inexplicable Dem demand that only four counties be recounted, and recounted, and recounted again, did in fact deny the other 63 Florida counties equal treatment in the processes under the Florida and US Constitutions. 

It was just one of dozens of bizarre occurrences after the election that had traditional Democrats cringing with embarrassment over the Progressive Extremist wing of the party creating a whole slew of new conspiracy theory industries that still  fester today; some people still aren’t over it.

This despite Mr Gore not winning his own home state and that no previous person had ever been elected to the American presidency without having won their home state. 

Had Gore won Tennessee, he would have won the Electoral College by 7 votes and Florida wouldn’t have mattered; no ‘progressive’ I have ever spoken to wants to admit that or ponder the consequences of Gore losing his own home state in 2000. 

They chose instead to join a massive Bush43 hate chorus that stifled his very shaky start and further divided the country as shouts of his ‘illegitimacy’ threatened the office itself.

Damn the facts of the day; they didn’t care what they said or did in defiance and that has weakened the presidency substantially…and we’ve been doing this to the presidency since at least 1992; 18 years!

Despite post-election analysis by even traditional leftie news organizations from the Associated Press, the New York Times and the Miami Herald that Mr Bush had indeed won Florida and the Electoral vote despite Mr Gore having won the national popular vote, the progressive extremists churned their hatred hourly without pause. 

After losing the 2000 election, Al Gore completely lost his mind and went off the deep-end eventually also losing his wife Tipper who is warming the globe of their gardener these days!

It was stunning and equally embarrassing how many Americans were clueless about how the Electoral College works and why it works to help equalize the large and small states and why the US Supreme Court was correct in stopping the unlawful shenanigans in the Florida recount. I recall being personally embarrassed by so many of my Democratic friends, allies, and cohorts—the supposedly educated and enlightened political elites—not having any idea how federal elections are conducted. 

For the first time since the end of the southern, racist Dixiecrat Dems’ iron-fisted control of the national Democratic Party, the current Democratic Party Progressive Extremist wing adopted a brand new ‘states’ rights’ position asserting Florida’s state superiority for their very first…and their very last time. 

Their cynicism and hypocrisy was and still is appalling. 

The Republican cynicism and hypocrisy was and still is equally appalling and I wrote at the time that the nation was more divided than even before our Civil War, and that we seemed destined to have a string of one-term presidents and the Congress flipping every four years or so for the next 25 to 30 years—the time it seems to take for modern social upheaval to be reabsorbed by the American fabric—and then on a cold and clear September morning—not even a year later—everything changed. 

‘The Smirk’ legitimately won and Dems enabled him every step of the way after he was sworn in!

Having done everything to de-legitimize George W Bush from his very first day in office, the sanctimonious left feigns shock today that the right is doing the very same thing to Barack Obama…and continues to do so. 

Mr Bush, being the first leader in all of human history to go into war without taxing the citizenship to pay for it, was also benefited by the fact that we have never thrown a president out in wartime, and he even pulled the rare same-party congressional mid-term seat pick ups in 2002 against the Dems who all but gave to him everything that he wanted…and more. 

The Patriot Act?  No Child Left Behind?  Non-means tested prescription drug benefits for all?  AIDS spending in Africa?  Africa?  Their current railing against Mr Bush’s eight year spending orgy conveniently neglects to inform that national Democrats were Mr Bush’s enablers every step of the way and that they are equally complicit. 

Not a single Dem offered a bill to impose a war tax either.  No one on either side is—or ever was—standing on higher ground, much less on any semblance of principles. 

This is the real legecy of the 2000 recount.

I suppose that history will remember that institutionally, America weathered to 2000 Florida recount, but that the consequences are an even more divided nation and the extremist wings of each major party controlling everything within their parties and one of the net results is that Washington’s enormous K-Street lobbying corps has grown from only a few in the late 1960’s to thousands and thousands and thousands of them today. 

Our ‘one man, one vote’ principles have been sold to the highest corporate bidders so it is credible to ask whether either Gore or Bush had won those 537 Florida votes in 2000, would it have made a tinker’s dam’s worth of difference? 

I don’t think it would have; only the players would have been different.

Dems lost all of their moderates in 2010, and whatever was left of the GOP’s moderates are all but extinct today too and the roiling and boiling of our political system is under its greatest strain since our Civil War 150 years ago. 

That isn’t a good thing for the nation or for the body politic and the coarseness and vitriol that envelopes every single issue and every single personality on both sides today isn’t dialogue, but monologue, and we’re a lesser nation and people because of it.

That’s the destructive legecy of the failed 2000 Florida recount.

Mike Zahara
12/17/2010
www.WatchdogWag.com