Election paranoia rampant on Left

Great editorial by AZ Republic writer Doug MacEachern
 
Jul. 11, 2004 12:00 AM
You can only imagine the grimaces shared among New York Times editors on April 3, 2001, as they stared at the headline to appear in the first editions of the next day's paper:
 
"Analysis of Florida ballots proves favorable to Bush."
 
Argh!
 
I've kept a copy of that story, as well as others that the Times and other newspapers, including USA Today and the Miami Herald, published after their analysis of Florida vote records. USA Today, the Herald and other Florida papers concluded that Bush almost certainly would have won had the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the recount to continue.
 
A month later, the Times, employing recount methods that even Al Gore's toadies on the Florida Supreme Court hadn't dreamed of, called the election results inconclusive. Using most recount methods, Bush wins. Standing on our heads and counting backward, Gore wins. Fine. But, as we all know so well, the Florida debacle evolved into the most ardently held article of liberal religious faith: The firm, incontrovertible belief that George W. Bush stole Florida, and so the presidency.
 
The first post-election spasm generated by that article of faith was the report on the conduct of the Florida election by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Upon release of the commission's preliminary report, chairman Mary Frances Berry said Florida was replete with corruption, and "voter disenfranchisement appears to be at the heart of the issue."
 
Of course, Berry also was one of Al Gore's most ardent fans, which showed in the way she shamelessly manipulated the media circus and the testimony provided to the committee to make it appear Bush, et al., had ridden into Florida with pointy hoods bulging out of their suitcases.
 
Her final report-slash-tirade included all sorts of allegations and suspicions and reports of police cars blockading polling stations that seemed to have been written for Political Paranoia Today. But, funny thing: None of it panned out. The Florida attorney general - like the county election directors in nearly all the disputed counties, a Democrat - fielded more than 2,600 election-related complaints. Three of those were related to race. But Berry and friends whipped up a Jim Crow vision of Florida anyway.
 
Now we're seeing the latter-day fruits of the Florida recount nightmare and Mary Berry's berry weird fantasies.
 
Eleven Democratic members of Congress, including Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, have sent a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, asking that the U.N. monitor the U.S. elections. In their letter, the congressmen and women specifically cite the Berry commission's report.
 
"The commission found that the electoral process in Florida resulted in the denial of the right to vote for countless persons . . . "
 
Of course, it did nothing of the kind. Mary Frances and friends asserted that "disenfranchisement" happened. They insisted it happened with all their left-liberal hearts and souls. But they came up with utterly no . . . you know . . . proof that it happened.
 
You won't see Grijalva and the other Dems taking note of the minority report produced by the Republicans on the committee, which included the observations of respected researcher Abigail Thernstrom: "The majority report used shoddy statistical analysis, coupled with anecdotal and unsubstantiated allegations - disregarding the preponderance of testimony - to paint a portrait of disfranchisement and intimidation of minorities in the Florida election that bears no resemblance whatsoever to actual fact."
 
Grijalva and the other Democrats aren't much interested in facts either. Why bother when you have so much anger working for you?
 
The really irksome thing about their letter to Kofi Annan is the contempt it shows for Americans generally. The U.S., in their view, really is no different from nations like Haiti, Liberia or Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where vote manipulation and rigged outcomes are all part of the national landscape.
 
It's not even a partisan contempt. Like their ideological brother Michael Moore, they think ill of all of us. When Moore was laughing with his friends in France about how easily manipulated the lowbrow masses of the U.S. are, he wasn't differentiating Republicans from Democrats. His was a universal snort of contempt. He thinks we're all idiots. So do Grijalva and friends. We're mean-spirited, racist idiots.Their greatest affront, of course, is assigning a higher level of morality to the folks at the U.N., who currently are under investigation regarding the theft of perhaps $5 billion from the mouths of hungry Iraqi babies.
 
Now that's harsh.