At least he's a persistant idiot

Paul Krugman has completely outdone himself. Last week, the moron wrote a story (it must be a story, there's no truth in it), claiming that Gore won the 2000 election. Several conservative bloggers took him to task for this ignorant statement which has been proven wrong again and again. Today, he attempts to justify his lies by repeating them.

The 2000 election is still an open sore on the body politic. That was clear from the outraged reaction to my mention last week of what would have happened with a full statewide manual recount of Florida.

This reaction seems to confuse three questions. One is what would have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court hadn't intervened; the answer is that unless the judge overseeing the recount had revised his order (which is a possibility), George W. Bush would still have been declared the winner.

Which is what happened regardless of what you wanted to happen.

The second is what would have happened if there had been a full, statewide manual recount - as there should have been. The probable answer is that Al Gore would have won, by a tiny margin. (emphasis mine)

I won't call this an outright lie because he did say "probable." But that is the only reason it's not an outright lie and certainly not what he was claiming last week.

The third is what would have happened if the intentions of the voters hadn't been frustrated by butterfly ballots, felon purges and more; the answer is that Mr. Gore would have won by a much larger margin.

Now of course this is something that he has absolutely no way of knowing. But I suppose we could begin asking the same questions. What if the intentions of the voters hadn't been frustrated in Washington by Democrats who outright lied and broke the law to literally steal the gubernatorial election? What if the intentions of the voters hadn't been frustrated by illegal Democrat tactics in Wisconsin? How much larger would Bush's margin of victory be then? And these are only two states where interference in the voting process by Democrats has been proven. What about the ones we don't know about?

About the evidence regarding a manual recount: in April 2001 a media consortium led by The Miami Herald assessed how various recounts of "undervotes," which did not register at all, would have affected the outcome. Two out of three hypothetical statewide counts would have given the election to Mr. Gore. The third involved a standard that would have discarded some ballots on which the intended vote was clear. Since Florida law seemed to require counting such ballots, this standard almost certainly wouldn't have been used in a statewide recount.

From USA Today:

George W. Bush would have won a hand count of Florida's disputed ballots if the standard advocated by Al Gore had been used, the first full study of the ballots reveals

From the Miami Herald comes the truth of what Krugman is talking about.

The Herald's Monday story will focus on "what would have happened if the recount had gone forward without challenge" in four counties cited by Democrat Al Gore, Siebel said. The counties examined by the newspaper are Miami-Dade, Broward, Volusia and Palm Beach.

So Krugman's still got it wrong. If we only counted votes in four counties, then MAYBE Gore would have won. But we don't get to pick the districts that we want to vote.

>More broadly, the story of the 2000 election remains deeply disturbing - not just the fact that a man the voters tried to reject ended up as president, but the ugliness of the fight itself. There was an understandable urge to put the story behind us.

OK, I don't know where he gets off writing this statement unless he's suddenly trying to slam Al Gore. Because let's face facts. The election was close. It was close enough that if you can say the voters were trying to reject Bush, you can also say the same about Gore. And in other states the rejection was MUCH more forceful. In fact, if he hadn't captured a few key population centers that gave him California and a couple of other Democrat strongholds, the results would have looked much more like Reagan's defeat of Carter as far as electoral votes go. And as for the "ugliness" of the fight itself, I'd have to ask you who started the fight? I do believe that you'll find the answer to be Gore. He was the first one to start suing and he was the one who kept demanding recounts until they showed the results that he wanted.

Let's create a simple analogy that these wimpy liberals can understand. If you go up to a bully and start punching him, and that bully turns around and knocks you flat, you can't blame the bully. In the same way, if you start a fight over an election, then turn out to lose that fight, you can't blame your opponent.

Not to be coy: election 2000 may be receding into the past, but the Iraq war isn't. As the truth about the origins of that war comes out, there may be a temptation, once again, to prettify the story. The American people deserve better.

Well, it will certainly be interesting to find out what Krugman thinks is the "truth" about the Iraq war. I'm pretty certain he won't mention anything about the tens of thousands of people who died at Saddam's command, or the Kurds who were gassed by him or the millions of people who turned out, despite the threat of violence, to vote in their first real elections. I'm sure he'll forget to mention the schools and hospitals we're building and the infrastructure we're creating. Because after all, the only thing Bush said to Congress or the UN was that we were trying to stop WMDs. Yeah, right.

Posted by: Drew at 08:27 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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