The Wednesday morning ice nicely complemented my anger. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling(s) reflected a vote of 7-2 or 5-4 against Al Gore,
depending on which side of the bed they were trying to crawl into late on Tuesday night. My frustration is no longer hot. It is now frosty cold.
Convoluted. Confusing. Technical. These seem to be the buzzwords from the early morning TV pundits and hastily written news analyses pulled
from Internet.
In other words, Democrats lost on a technicality (Democrats, not Gore . . . this is about us, not him).
Sorry, sir, it looks like you are innocent, but we’re still sentencing your party to 4-8 years for stupidity. You could appeal, sir, but since you were executed ten minutes ago it’s kind of useless now. And anyway, it didn’t appear that King George had any interest in staying the execution, even if he had agreed to hear your appeal personally. So, please go away and leave us alone. We need to get our beauty sleep for the coronation in January.
In best Repugnant Party form, they chanted the mantra over and over for weeks. “We’ve counted three times already.” Say anything loudly and sarcastically enough, it becomes a truth. Republicans are good at it. Democrats are not. That’s because truths are seldom simple, and our genetic predisposition to actually, God forbid, delve into the details of trivial subjects, such as economics, bores the public to death. Good lord, the NFL playoffs are looming, we better wrap this up now.
We tried to simplify. Count the vote. That’s not complicated. The only votes counted “three times” were the ones run through the machines. The
40,000 uncounted, uninspected, unchecked, unwanted ballots that the “machines” said were non-votes were never counted, except in West Palm
Beach and Broward Counties, and that was more a matter of luck than anything else. Even yesterday morning, as free lunch tickets were being handed out to the faithful who made it to work in a mild ice storm (who said there is no such thing as a free lunch), one of the office young Republicans in-waiting is arguing with my party committeeman (who also happens to be a neighbor and coworker) that Al Baby was “manufacturing” votes in South Florida with the hand recounts. Even though he watched it on TV himself, saw the Republican monitors, saw the TV cameras recording every move. Despite all the attention and oversight, he was certain that alchemy was being performed: ballots were being created out of whiteout and toilet paper.
Excuse me, sir, is there any hope of you meeting reality on a face-to-face basis anytime in the near future?
I’m a little man. I don’t get to sit in on high-level political teas, where $5,000 contributors to both parties hash the details of sell-out sweetheart political deals in nice and polite double-talk. I do my work in the trenches where the rhetoric is hot, and it stinks down here.
Trust the machines. Trust a Republican to say that without laughing out loud. What a nice Germanic thought. Machines can’t be wrong. Machines don’t make mistakes. Ignore the fact that machines are made by humans, maintained by humans, operated by humans. GIGO: Garbage in, garbage out. Anyone who has seen the Windows operating system freeze and crash for no apparent reason understands the depth of human error, and why it can only be a human that can catch and fix it. If you are missing a $1,000 deposit on your bank statement, you better not count on an adding machine to discover the problem (see how tape keeps coming up the same every time!). You better direct your complaint to the customer service office, where a human being can actually view your deposit slip and say: “Sorry, we’ll fix the balance.”
We went to the courts, and we thought the courts were composed of human beings. But they were just machines, and the court machinery was rusty. . .it ground to a halt.
If Gore wants to leave a legacy, I would recommend that he found a non-profit organization to aggressively monitor voting irregularities, fight with vigor against minority voter intimidation and lobby endlessly for the complete removal of all mechanical, paper ballot voting machines in the entire United States of America.
I’ll even contribute.
Trying to find the point to this election “protest” reminds me of the movie Midnight Express, where the hero ends up in the prison insane asylum. Going to the “wheel” to take his exercise, the other prisoners all walk counter-clockwise. Our hero walks clockwise, and is assailed by wailing inmates. He is told he is in the asylum because he is a “bad machine.” In order to get better, he must become a “good machine” and walk in the right direction.
Al Gore conceded Tuesday night. He will become a good machine.
Me. . .I only walk to the left. I guess I’m still a bad machine.
