Why is it *my* #%^*ing fault?

[Jim Lane]

71. The Nader loyalists never seem to remember that an event can have more than one cause.

Katherine Harris engineered the illegal disenfranchisement of some 50,000 voters, almost all of them likely Gore supporters. Yet I never hear the Nader cheerleaders dismissing her criminality by saying, "Well, Bush became President because of the Supreme Court. Or Lieberman. Or Gore lost Tennessee." Or whatever. No one thinks that those other factors retroactively exculpate Katherine Harris. No, that kind of twisted logic is used only when the purpose is to spring to the defense of Saint Ralph.

By the way, what's your basis for asserting that Lieberman was a drag on the ticket? Like any running mate, he repelled some voters but attracted others. My recollection is that he was popular in Florida. In the spring, the conventional wisdom was that the four largest states were all locks -- California and New York for the Democrat but Texas and Florida for the Republican. With Lieberman on the ticket, Florida was instead very close. If our ticket had been (for example) Gore-Kerry, I think Bush would've won Florida without help from the Supreme Court. (Of course, the Gore-Kerry ticket might have won New Hampshire, getting to 270 without Florida, but that's another issue.)