bush won...

RE: bush won his appointment to office

It's quite true that Clinton didn't get a majority. I should have been more specific. The 2000 election was one where the losing candidate got more votes than the winning candidate. That is a much, much rarer event, and one that casts a bit of a pall over the extent of the winner's mandate.

That said, in any system where the vote is divided up in some way (eg by individual seats in a parliament or by the state-based electoral college in the USA) it is always possible to have a "winner" who gets fewer overall votes than the "loser". It's an inherent flaw in the system. The question is, is this a flaw that is acceptable because it has other benefits?

I'm still interested because the argument over the result showed the most appalling amateur and downright incompetent methods of actually conducting elections that the world has seen in many a long year. If the USA wants to sound credible in telling everybody else what a wonderful thing democracy is, it needs to make sure it has a credible election system, not one that makes it the laughing stock of the western world.

Oh, and by the way, the next President of the USA needs to have a proper mandate, too, not one that is argued about for the next 4 years.

odd that you don't see US members trying to dictate for australians whom they select as their next PM...

RE: bush won his appointment to office

>But remember, Gore only wins if they count dimples and chads,

I thought I made this clear earlier, but apparently not. Those absentee ballots I referred to that were marked for Bush but were illegal because the applications were filled out in part by Republican officials rather than by the voters, as Florida law requires -- there are thousands of them, far more than Bush's margin of victory in Florida. Take those votes out of the count, and Bush loses the state chads or no chads. Get it?

RE: bush won his appointment to office

there IS a difference. my grammar,

>syntax, and diction are beyond reproach.

No. According to Strunk and White's "Manual of Style," a comma is not to be used between the penultimate word in a series and the conjunction "and," as seen in the sentence above.

I wonder what humorous deity it is who so often arranges that posters who boast about their command of English here make obvious errors in the very posts in which they crow? Perhaps Franco knows.

Oh dear, another person who can't read.

I wasn't telling Americans WHO they should select. I was pointing out that Americans can hardly preach the virtues of democracy to other countries if they have such a laughably inept physical system of counting votes. It casts a pall over whoever wins the result.

RE: bush won his appointment to office

>No. According to Strunk and White's "Manual of Style," a...

S & W isn't the only style manual. try again.

>posters who boast about their command of English here make

>obvious errors in the very posts in which they crow?

there are no such errors in my posts. try again.

RE: bush won his appointment to office

ugh... i broke my own rule about not replying to any of the patent nonsense woodlawn posts.

discussion ended.

i'm sorry and it won't happen again.

RE: bush won his appointment to office

>And no, nobody knows what the true result of the Florida

>election would have been. Even the review of ballots by the

>eight news organizations wasn't a complete recount.

I love how everything the New York Times reports - especially those conclsions derived from "studies" conduct by "experts - is considered the gospel, except in those rare instances when such conclusions contradict, rather than bolster, the Left's agenda, and then those conclusions suddenly become suspect and inconclusive.

The NYT says outright that its study proved that U.S. Supreme Court did not alter the outcome of the election, because Bush would have been elected even had that Court had affirmed the Florida State Supreme Court's order to recount, and yet the most anti-reality liberals still stomp their feet and, based on nothing but their own fury, claim that Bush was appointed by that court. That's why there is no reasoning with such people; they are not operating in the world of reason.

>Although

>that would have made him a legitimate president under the

>Constitution, it would hardly be a mandate for the kind of

>headlong stampede back to the 19th Century that he and the

>other Greedy Old Plutocrats are trying to ram down America's

>throat! Under the actual circumstances of his appointment to

>office, he has no mandate at all.

What do you consider to be a "mandate" and who was the last President to be elected with one?

The 2000 elections were a pretty strong rebuke to Democrats - rejecting an incumbant Vice President who served in an Administration that saw nothing but huge economic growth and prosperity (thanks to technological innovations, not to Bill Clinton) against a poor campaigner in George Bush. You have to be a pretty awful party, with a painfully low standing among the populace, to lose an election under those circumstances.

And if you didn't like the 2000 elections as a "mandate," how about the 2002 elections? Those seemed pretty decisive to me. And how about Bush's popularity ratings, still quite strong compared to most of his recent predecessors even in the face of a (previously) declining economy?

You will just shut your eyes so tightly to avoid looking at any fact that contradicts your ideological theology, won't you? I bet you think that the economy isn't doing better, right?

Blind, dogmatic, mindless ideologues exist on both sides of the spectrum, of course, and they always helpfully exhibit telltale signs that enable one to spot them immediately. The liberal flame-carriers of this madness make it very easy to detect them: they are the ones who, TO THIS DAY, are consumingly bitter about the resolution of the 2000 election (for which there was NO good resolution) and who still prattle on about Bush's legitimacy as President.

RE: bush won his appointment to office

>As to Florida, there is also the little fact that Katherine

>Harris, then secretary of state under JEB!, deliberately

>disenfranchised thousands of black voters by removing their

>names from the rolls of eligible voters. Voters who naturally

>would have tipped the election in Gore's favor.

What does this have to do with the U.S. Supreme Court? That issue was never before it.

Many Bush haters have frequently said that Bush owes his Presdiency to his father's appointments on the U.S. Supreme Court. I have read that here lots of times.

Are you one of the people who have said this? If so, how can you say such that given that it is proven to be false?

And if you aren't one of the people who have said this, why haven't you pointed out to those ideological comrades of yours who have said it that what they are saying isn't true? Given your propesnity for calling those in the public arena "liars", I would have thought you would have been all over that. What happened?

>I wasn't telling Americans WHO they should select. I was

>pointing out that Americans can hardly preach the virtues of

>democracy to other countries if they have such a laughably

>inept physical system of counting votes. It casts a pall over

>whoever wins the result.

In virtually every post you write here, you manage to include some snide, condescending insult about how primtive and unsophisticated and embarrassing Americans and American institutions are, and you can rarely resist the oppotunity to lecture us about how we should be. It's relly quite revolting, and I'm glad that others are now seeing it and pointing it out.

What makes it so much more disgusting is that you don't even have the courage of your convictions. You slip these haughty anti-American insults into your posts, and then retreat and run away from them whenever you are confronted, trying to masquerade them as more innocuous but totally patronizing tripe such as: "Oh, I'm not anti-American - I LOVE America and am only saying these things to help you becuase you have gone very wrong and don't see it, but I and my sophisticated comrades in Europe do."

Have the courage of your convictions - as vile as they are - and don't disguise your putrid views. Just admit them. It took me 10 posts after you defended that LeMonde cartoon to get you to finally admit that you see Al Qaeda as morally indistinguishable from the U.S. because you see the 9/11 attacks as morally indistinguisable from the U.S.'s involvmenet in the overthrow of the etxreme murderous Communist dictator in Chile 30 years ago. And everything you say about the U.S. comes from that perspective.

And I would think you would be too busy lecturing your fellow countrymen to come here and lecture Americans. After all, most of them appear to find your views as repulsive as I do. I just read that the Labor Party had to remove its leader because it faces the liklihood of a slaughter in your upcoming election aginst your courageous Prime Minister who vigorously supported your country's involvement in the war in Iraq.

Speaking of mandates, there's one for you. John Howard is heading to crushing defeat against those like you, and you are left to wallow in your own failure and in the rejection of your world view by your fellow Australians. No wonder you come here so often and lecture us about our political and cultural deficiencies - it allows you to forget about the wholesale failure of your anti-war comrades to achieve anything but defeat.

RE: bush won his appointment to office

>>As to Florida, there is also the little fact that Katherine

>>Harris, then secretary of state under JEB!, deliberately

>>disenfranchised thousands of black voters by removing their

>>names from the rolls of eligible voters. Voters who

>naturally

>>would have tipped the election in Gore's favor.

>

>What does this have to do with the U.S. Supreme Court? That

>issue was never before it.

Only the connection of like-minded souls.

"Rehnquist became chief justice even though he was accused - in the most delicious irony yet of this disputed presidential election - of behavior that is eerily close to that which may have bedeviled African-American voters in Florida.

"Democratic Party workers in Arizona testified in 1986 that in the early 1960s, then Republican operative Rehnquist harassed people of color in Phoenix with literacy tests at the polls."

http://www.commondreams.org/views/121300-101.htm

"The election of 2000 was decided not by the popular will of voters, but in Washington, D.C., by a narrow five-four conservative majority of Supreme Court justices. Chief Justice William Rehnquist's refusal to acknowledge evidence of blatant voter fraud against African Americans was no surprise. Back in 1962, when Rehnquist was a young attorney in Arizona, he led a group of Republican lawyers who systematically challenged the right of minority voters to cast their ballots in that state. Called 'Operation Eagle Eye,' Rehnquist successfully disenfranchised hundreds of black and brown voters in Phoenix's poor and working class precincts. In 2000, Rehnquist supervised the disenfranchisement, in effect, of the majority of American voters."

http://www.colorado.edu/journals/standards/V7N2/FIRST/marable.html

"Today's Supreme Court decision may determine the next president of the United States. But William Rehnquist, the Chief Justice of the court-- tasked with determining whose ballots will count and be counted-- has a history of racism and excluding people of color from voting.

"In 1964, Rehnquist demonstrated his segregationist sentiments when he fought the passage of a Phoenix ordinance permitting Blacks to enter stores and restaurants.

"Between 1958 and 1962, when Rehnquist was a private attorney in Arizona, he served as the director of Republican "ballot security" operations in poor neighborhoods in Phoenix. Rehnquist was part of Operation Eagle Eye, a flying squad of GOP lawyers that swept through polling places in minority-dominated districts to challenge the right of African Americans and Latinos to vote. At the time, Democratic poll watchers had to physically push Rehnquist out of the polling place to stop him from interfering with voting rights.

"Two decades later, during Rehnquist's 1986 Senate confirmation hearing for appointment to head the Supreme Court, he denied targeting minority voters. Some election watchers, who had personally observed Rehnquist's tactics in Phoenix, accused him of lying to Congress.

http://archive.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn20001212.html

Hate to interrupt your diatribe, little doug, but the latest polls show the Howard government would LOSE an election held now. So much for the crushing defeat.