Lingering doubtfuls

The post mortem of the undead

by Barry Crimmins

The problem with most elections is that somebody wins. So much for that problem. That we had no presidential winner on election night didn't really bother me. One lame president at a time is plenty. Besides, I don't believe in presidents, just Yoko and me.

So on Election Day, I ignored the dire warnings of mealy-mouthed liberals and voted for Ralph Nader in Ohio, a battleground state. I felt clean and noble and proud of myself. Vote hope, not fear, eh, Yoko?

My Era of Good Feeling lasted less than a day. An old culprit ended it.

I've said for years that Richard Nixon is like herpes -- just when you think he's gone, he flares up again. Not even his death ended Nixon outbreaks. So when Republicans started saying Gore should emulate Nixon who conceded in 1960 rather than challenge the results in Cook County, Illinois, where dead voters favored Jack Kennedy over Tricky Dick by a five-to-one ratio, the enemy of my enemies became my friend. I was for Gore -- but just until this mess was over.

Besides I knew a majority of voters in Florida and the USA wanted Gore, and I wasn't about to let Saint Dick commit larceny from the grave. Maybe he got screwed in '60, but I have no doubt that he kept his mouth shut about it because opening it would have also opened some other Nixonian closet exposing an even worse fraud or scandal.

It's not as if the "M" in Richard M. Nixon stood for magnanimous. In 1962 when he lost the California gubernatorial race to Pat Brown, Nixon wasn't exactly gracious. And then when he returned to kick the Constitution and Bill of Rights all over the Rose Garden for the next six years, he wasn't much for considering the country's good ahead of his own. So when the R's invoked the late prez, I had to take this personally. I wasn't alone.

By Friday afternoon the cost of Campaign 2000 was written all over George W. Bush's face.

A stress boil, undoubtedly the first payment due to Bush strategist Satan for his work in Florida, drew attention above the Texas Governor's collar, an area millions of voters failed to consider just three days earlier.

There was disagreement as to whether the boil, six times the size of Bush's brain but only twice as competent, marked the spot from which the alien or anti-Christ would emerge. But everyone concurred that if the pus-laden Goliath continued to expand at its present rate the next photo-op would have to be held in the Astrodome. There was also consensus that the lopsidedness caused by the growth on his right cheek made America's still-uncrowned prince appear even goofier than usual.

In 1948 when Tom Dewey was ruined when someone noticed he resembled the man on the wedding cake, at least he was left some dignity. In 2000 Bush has been likened to Alfred E. Neuman on the cover of MAD Magazine. And now there's talk of a defamation of character suit. From Newman.

So even at this grave moment in American history it was hard to pay much attention to the silly man sitting with his chaperone/running mate Dick Cheney. Nevertheless the gist of his remarks concerning the undecided presidential election filtered through: Surrender, Dorothy!

Unfortunately cast in the role Ms. Garland immortalized is the aforementioned Al Gore, a man so shifty he isn't even from his own home state. Gore's father was a US Senator from Tennessee and Al grew up in Washington -- thus the half-hearted bid to win his home/away state and its 11 electoral votes. Early Wednesday morning we knew Tennessee could have, but didn't, provide him with enough to put him over the top in that ancient safeguard against direct American democracy, the Electoral College.

Florida was a different story. Gore was there throughout the fall and ended the campaign with a Tampa rally early Tuesday. Well he thought he ended the Florida campaign in Tampa Tuesday morning. As I write this, it's the following Monday, and Florida is still being contested at the ballot box, in the courts, in the streets, and in the media. It seems only bad news comes from Florida -- hurricanes, tourist slayings, crop failures, mass murders, an electric chair that only goes to "medium high," and this year, hostage situations. Last spring, the world's eyes were on Miami where Elian Gonzalez was held for political ransom by relatives less qualified to be foster guardians than former Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight.

The new standoff involves the last shred of American democratic dignity getting ruled invalid because it was found to have 19,000 or so extra punch-holes in it. As a result, the presidential election may be decided by Jewish people voting for a man who is soft on Nazis.

During his run for president, George W. Bush promised the American people to return ethics to Washington. If stealing the state his brother Jeb Bush governs is all it takes for him to keep his promise, it's a sacrifice he appears happy to make.

The more urgent the GOP's pleas for Gore to concede an election fraught with more irregularity than that suffered by participants in a cheese-eating contest, the more suspicious their hurry becomes. The Electoral College doesn't meet until December 18, and the new president isn't inaugurated until January 20 so what's the rush? Suggestions that Bush needs the extra time to name his cabinet are silly. Junior will name the team when his father tells him who is on it.

As soon as he selected Dick Cheney as his running mate, any notion that W. was his own man was replaced by the understanding that this was Daddy's campaign. Cheney and his wife, Lynn, who shouldn't be let back on the streets until she has been milked of all the venom that has backed up in her during the campaign, are old Poppy loyalists.

One thing that Cheney and young Bush have in common is drunken-driving convictions. But no worry there, if "elected" and they both attend the same party, they'll simply name one the designated Commander-in-Chief. As W. waits to see if the Florida fix holds, he sits within leash-length of Cheney, not uttering a word that hasn't been carefully scripted. On the Florida front, Poppy's old auxiliary president, James Baker and a team of GOP ground troops spout impatient, condescending rhetoric. "The nation needs to move forward." "The United States shouldn't be dragged through all this muck just because Al Gore doesn't want to face electoral facts."

"This election should be decided at the polling place and not in the courtroom"

It's appropriate that in the election that won't die, the Texas governor has surrounded himself by the politically undead. His "dream team" of advisers is Baker, Cheney, and war criminal emeritus Henry Kissinger. Of the three, only Kissinger has yet to demand Gore's sword and that's only because he's been laid up by a heart attack. Who'd have thought him eligible?

Baker and the other formal Bush representatives were diplomatic compared to the Republican man on the street in Florida. Snarls about Jesse Jackson's appearance at a Wednesday protest in West Palm Beach and signs suggesting "Don't Circumcise the Election!" unmasked prejudices that are much more welcome in the GOP's big tent of bigotry than the minority quislings who appeared in political drag at the GOP's Philadelphia convention in an attempt to make the party appear diverse.

Still, the basic message from Republicans in the streets and suites was "Gore is a sore loser!"

What they were really trying to convince us, and themselves, of was that Gore had lost at all.

Now the Republicans are acting like a football team that fumbled the winning touchdown across the goal line. They are trying to get the extra point unit on the field as quickly as possible so that the other team can't ask for a replay that will surely cause the touchdown to be reviewed and nullified.

So they scream "Let's keep this out of the courts" and "Concede for the good of the country!" while they themselves go to court in an attempt to keep the instant replay from being used.

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