There was a recent article in The Daily Beast by ALTERMAN, sounding as outraged now as we all did in 2000, and I was getting worked up for the umpteenth time since 2000 (no, Asshole-SCALIA, I won't get over it), and "Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo" was running in the background, a harmless movie correct?!1 Imagine my shock and disgust to have Shrub pop into the movie as pretty much the good guy, WTF. So here is the first piece, NEW, sounding like it is from 2000, and the 2nd piece from 2008 in a weird juxtaposition.
And BOIES's incompetence is even more infuriating. But back at the time, we knew that, and that the GORE team of a tired old Warren CHRISTOPHER was no match for the starved-for-power, stop-at-nothing Shrub team. What I have always admitted only to myself was that GORE's choices, including LIEBERMAN, show the flaws in GORE himself.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-12-04/bush-v-gore-decision-looks-even-more-disgraceful-10-years-later/?cid=topic:featured2More Politics Bush V. Gore's Disgrace Deepens
by Eric Alterman
Passions are supposed to recede with time as wisdom and maturity, but the Supreme Court’s willingness to hand the presidency to George W. Bush looks even worse than it did 10 years ago, when passions flared and pundits feared for the future of the republic. The obvious problem with making Bush president was the fact of the Bush presidency, a catastrophe in so many directions at once that presidential historians argue today about whether Bush was the worst president in American history or merely the worst since Grant, Buchanan, or Johnson (Andrew, not Lyndon). ....
But even if Bush had been a great president, Bush v. Gore would have been a disgraceful decision. Consider this: To prevent a careful recount of the vote, the self-professed conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court ignored the decision of lower federal courts, which four times had rejected similar stay requests from the Bush campaign. As a result, the majority could not cite any real, germane Florida statutory law to support its contention that the counting must be ended immediately. Instead, the court chose to overturn a state court’s election laws as interpreted by that state’s supreme court on the basis of a legal theory that the justices simply made up on the spot: that different counting standards violate the equal protection and due process provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Had this theory had been applied across the board, it would have called into question almost every single state’s counting methods, but of course there was no danger of that. .....
...what the NORC researchers really discovered was the Gore legal team’s incredible incompetence.
Gore’s legal advisers chose, it turned out, pretty much the only counting method available that would have lost them the election. Instead of an inclusive recount of Florida’s vote—one that would have been most fair to Florida’s voters, Gore’s top lawyer, David Boies, asked the court to count “undervotes” only. Using that method, Bush did indeed outpoll Gore, and the court’s intervention did not ultimately make a difference. It turned out to be the perfect coda to a perfectly awful campaign.
But buried beneath this colossal error, as I’ve said over and over, was the inescapable fact that Gore was the genuine choice of a plurality of Florida’s voters as well as America’s. As the Associated Press reported in its examination of the NORC report, “In the review of all the state’s disputed ballots, Gore edged ahead under all six scenarios for counting all undervotes and overvotes statewide.” As I pointed out in my book What Liberal Media?, he beat Bush by almost every conceivable counting standard. Gore won under a strict-counting scenario and he won under a loose-counting scenario. He won if you counted “hanging chads” and he won if you counted “dimpled chads.” He won if you counted a dimpled chad only in the presence of another dimpled chad on the same ballot—the so-called Palm Beach standard. He even won if you counted only a fully punched chad. He won if you counted partially filled oval on an optical scan and he won if you counted only a fully filled optical scan. He won if you fairly counted the absentee ballots. No matter what, if everyone who legally voted in Florida had had a chance to see their vote counted, then Al Gore not George W. Bush, was elected president. ....
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/04/george_w_bush.htmlHow George W. Bush Became Hollywood's Eccentric Uncle
4/24/08
.... The Times' Dennis Lim refers to Bush's depiction in this week's stoner comedy Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantánamo Bay as "arguably the most sympathetic movie portrayal of him to date" — but apparently he hasn't read the widely leaked early draft of the screenplay to Oliver Stone's biopic. Both portrayals mostly bypass direct criticism of the president, substituting bemusement and — dare we say it? — affection. He's not a bad guy, just an amiable buffoon — a figure to poke fun at, like an eccentric uncle, but not to revile.
It's admirable, in a way, that at his lowest point — with his popularity in the cellar and his political influence in the toilet — pop culture is willing to cut George W. Bush some slack. It's also disheartening that the leader of the free world is so unimportant that even self-righteous Hollywood blowhards can't be bothered to get angry at him.
In Harold & Kumar, the titular heroes — on the run from a rabid Homeland Security official played by Rob Corddry — parachute into Bush's Crawford, Texas, office, only to be secreted away by the president in his guesthouse. There — surrounded by bikini posters, dartboards, and a sweet jukebox — the prez smokes up with our heroes and laughs about the ordeal they've been through. The movie portrays Bush as a genial fuckup — "Shit, it's Cheney!" he says. "That guy scares the crap out of me" — who defends his own policies with a shrug and a wink. And it's Bush who delivers the closest H&K comes to a political message: "You don't need to believe in your government to be a good American. You just have to believe in your country." ....
...the illusion that the guy at the top does, after all, share our sensibilities. Maybe all that's gone wrong with his presidency isn't truly his fault — it's the fault of the jerks and dumbasses he has working for him. (In an already-infamous H&K scene, Rob Corddry's Homeland Security chief wipes his butt with the Bill of Rights.) We can't help but think that the real George W. Bush can't be all that upset by this version of him, given the alternatives. We can imagine the president who has long taken advantage of those who misunderestimate him watching Harold & Kumar, laughing heartily — and giving a satisfied nod. ....
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