To become President, Al Gore was willing to disenfranchise men and women risking their lives for us.
COUNT OFF
"It's really quite simple," Al said.
"The one who's behind should have led,
So we'll void votes for George
And then we will forge
Enough ballots to put me ahead."
In his new book, At Any Cost, Bill Sammon of the Washington Times recounts how "Democrats resolved to turn Mr. Gore's defeat into a powerful political weapon. They decided to never let go of the Florida story, but rather to constantly repeat and even embellish it until it attained the status of legend. Mr. Bush had stolen the election, pure and simple, the Democrats argued. He was aided in this colossal theft by right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court and racist storm troopers in Florida Governor Jeb Bush's political machine who systematically barred blacks from the polls. It was important to inject race into the story line," Sammon explains, "even though there was virtually no evidence that blacks were turned away, because the Democrats desperately needed to reclaim the moral high ground after Mr. Gore's unseemly power grab. So they tried to transmogrify the Florida election into some gigantic civil rights abomination."
The truth could hardly be more different. Duval County is "home to more military families than any other county in Florida," observes Sammon. "So it was no surprise," he says, "that Duval had more absentee ballots from overseas than any other county -- 618 of 3,500 cast statewide. Neither was it a surprise that five Gore lawyers showed up at the elections office . . . to disqualify as many of those ballots as possible."
Sammon reports that the supervisor of elections had "checked signatures on ballot envelopes against signature cards on file. He determined that only two absentee ballots could not be included because the signatures did not match. But now the Democrats insisted that they be allowed to compare all signatures, one by one," Sammon relates. "For seven tedious hours, they bitterly argued that signatures on more than 100 envelopes did not precisely match the signature cards -- although some envelopes had been signed by sailors on rolling seas in hostile situations. Even more infuriating were attempts by Democrats to disqualify military ballots that had no overseas postmark. The ostensible logic," he explains, "was that some voters might have marked their ballots a day or two after the election and then mailed them in."
Sammon charges that "the Gore lawyers took this argument to absurd lengths by actually disqualifying ballots received before November 7th. The Gore lawyers," he notes, "protested ballots on which the return address of the attesting witness was incomplete. They railed against ballots on which foreign postmarks were smudged or partially illegible. At 4:11 a.m. -- more than 19 hours after it began -- the nightmarish battle over Duval's military ballots came to an end," Sammon recalls. "Duval was the last of Florida's 67 counties to complete the arduous task. When the canvassing board announced that the ballots of 149 soldiers, sailors, and airmen had been disqualified, a pair of jubilant Gore lawyers exchanged high-fives."
COUNT OFF
"It's really quite simple," Al said.
"The one who's behind should have led,
So we'll void votes for George
And then we will forge
Enough ballots to put me ahead."
In his new book, At Any Cost, Bill Sammon of the Washington Times recounts how "Democrats resolved to turn Mr. Gore's defeat into a powerful political weapon. They decided to never let go of the Florida story, but rather to constantly repeat and even embellish it until it attained the status of legend. Mr. Bush had stolen the election, pure and simple, the Democrats argued. He was aided in this colossal theft by right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court and racist storm troopers in Florida Governor Jeb Bush's political machine who systematically barred blacks from the polls. It was important to inject race into the story line," Sammon explains, "even though there was virtually no evidence that blacks were turned away, because the Democrats desperately needed to reclaim the moral high ground after Mr. Gore's unseemly power grab. So they tried to transmogrify the Florida election into some gigantic civil rights abomination."
The truth could hardly be more different. Duval County is "home to more military families than any other county in Florida," observes Sammon. "So it was no surprise," he says, "that Duval had more absentee ballots from overseas than any other county -- 618 of 3,500 cast statewide. Neither was it a surprise that five Gore lawyers showed up at the elections office . . . to disqualify as many of those ballots as possible."
Sammon reports that the supervisor of elections had "checked signatures on ballot envelopes against signature cards on file. He determined that only two absentee ballots could not be included because the signatures did not match. But now the Democrats insisted that they be allowed to compare all signatures, one by one," Sammon relates. "For seven tedious hours, they bitterly argued that signatures on more than 100 envelopes did not precisely match the signature cards -- although some envelopes had been signed by sailors on rolling seas in hostile situations. Even more infuriating were attempts by Democrats to disqualify military ballots that had no overseas postmark. The ostensible logic," he explains, "was that some voters might have marked their ballots a day or two after the election and then mailed them in."
Sammon charges that "the Gore lawyers took this argument to absurd lengths by actually disqualifying ballots received before November 7th. The Gore lawyers," he notes, "protested ballots on which the return address of the attesting witness was incomplete. They railed against ballots on which foreign postmarks were smudged or partially illegible. At 4:11 a.m. -- more than 19 hours after it began -- the nightmarish battle over Duval's military ballots came to an end," Sammon recalls. "Duval was the last of Florida's 67 counties to complete the arduous task. When the canvassing board announced that the ballots of 149 soldiers, sailors, and airmen had been disqualified, a pair of jubilant Gore lawyers exchanged high-fives."
