November
30, 2000
There
is NO Moral Equivalency
By John
McIntyre
For the past
three weeks all we have heard from Democrats and the media about
the struggle in Florida is that "both sides are at fault,"
"neither candidate has been presidential," and "a
pox on both your houses." This case for moral equivalency
between Bush and Gore is critical to the Democrats' argument.
If, as the rationale goes, both sides are to blame and the election
ended in a tie, then "why can't we just have a compromise
that affords both sides with a 50/50 chance win the Presidency?"
This would seem like a reasonable solution, provided those underlying
suppositions were true. The problem for Gore is that the suppositions
are not even close to being true. Both sides are not to blame.
And this election, while ridiculously close, did not end a tie.
Vice President
Gore had a right to conduct a recount of the votes. He has had
that recount of votes. When the recount upheld the original result,
that should have been the end of this fiasco. However, even before
the original recount was finished, Gore, and his partner in crime
Senator Lieberman, decided in their minds that they really won
the election. What has followed has been their all-out assault
to change what happened on election day in Florida.
At some point,
the Democrats and the press have an obligation to the truth. We
all know they support Al Gore and dislike Republicans, but can
they be so blinded by ideology that they can't distinguish between
right and wrong, fact and fiction? This week on The O'Reilly Factor,
Bill O'Reilly nearly had an aneurysm arguing with Congresswoman
Zoe Lofgren about the supposed precedent setting case of dimpled
ballots in Illinois. Rep. Lofgren refused to accept the facts
in that case and continued on with her same argument, oblivious
to the truth.
It is impossible
to have a rational dialogue if one side does not acknowledge that
2+2=4. The Clinton/Gore Democratic Party is beginning to assume
the same logic as the O.J. Jury, "I don't care how much DNA
evidence is splattered around, O.J's innocent and I don't care
how many laws you cite or facts you tell me, Al Gore won the election."
Vice President
Gore addressed the nation Monday and said "many thousands
of votes that were cast on Election Day have not yet been counted
at all, not once." This is of course not true. But the press,
with the exception of FOX News, continues to let the Democrats
get away with the canard that somehow there are thousands of votes
out there that have never been counted.
We have also
been told that a "mob" of Republicans intimidated the
Miami-Dade County board into not going forward with the hand recount,
even though the board members have stated repeatedly, for the
record, that was NOT the reason the hand recount was stopped.
We are told
that Gore picked up almost 200 votes from the initial hand recount
of 20% of Miami-Dade county, and therefore could expect 600 plus
more Gore votes from recounting the whole county. But we aren't
told that the 20% recounted were overwhelmingly Democratic
precincts, that the remaining 80% include the Cuban-American
precincts that voted massively in favor of George W. Bush, and
that in reality Gore would probably pick up nothing close
to 600 votes. But why let the truth get in the way of stealing
an election. The idea is simple: if the lie is told often enough,
perception becomes the reality.
Mr. Gore
complains that all he wants is "a single, full and accurate
count." But when asked why Democratic lawyers disqualified
military ballots on technicalities and are now currently trying
to disqualify Republican votes in Seminole County on an extreme
technicality that borders on a joke, he says "well, we have
to follow the rules." Democrats and members of the press
brush these glaring contradictions aside with the attitude that
"both sides are guilty of hypocrisy and are equally to blame."
Have the
Democrats become so partisan, and their desire to hold on to power
become so great, that they refuse to acknowledge the reality that
Gore is trying to overturn this election by divining votes out
of thin air? Do they seriously believe it is right to not only
cherry pick votes in overwhelmingly pro-Gore counties, but when
even that doesn't yield enough votes, to change the rules midstream
and then start combing through selected precincts or selected
undervotes? Are there any leaders left in the Democratic Party
who will stand up and say "enough is enough, this must stop?"
George Stephanopoulos
let the the cat out of the bag this Sunday when he said; "the
truth is that Democrats feel, even though they may want to give
up in the end, that forcing George W. Bush to get elected by Republicans
in the Florida legislature and dispute in the House, will enhance
their political prospects in 2002 even more." What does it
say when the leaders of the Democrat Party, Gephardt and Daschle,
are willing to push the country through a Constitutional crisis
just to gain an edge in the mid-term elections?
This trend
towards turning every crisis into a partisan free for all has
got to end. Democrats and Republicans have plenty of legitimate
policy and ideological differences to disagree on, they don't
need to turn behavior which should be out of bounds to all
good people, irrespective of party affiliation, into a partisan
food fight. Bill Clinton should have been asked to resign, by
members of his own party, for disgracing his office and
breaking the law. Al Gore would have become President, and he
would have been reelected in a landslide.
What is happening
in Florida right now should not be a partisan issue. Republicans
and Democrats can disagree on taxes, spending, the role of government,
but they shouldn't disagree on the principal that when the party
in power loses an election they have a duty to the greatest democracy
in the world to accept that result - no matter how close the election
might have been. It is wrong to try and reverse the result of
a lawful election by any means necessary. Al Gore obviously does
not have the wisdom or dignity to do what's right to honor our
great country. Hopefully there are still people in the Democrat
Party who do.
John McIntyre writes for RealClearPolitics
Mr.
McIntyre can be heard live every Monday morning on the
Hugh Hewitt Show 9:30 EST
