From: Jay_Thomas@putnaminv.com
Date: Tue Nov 28 2000 - 06:33:03 PST
A different analysis, pretty much in keeping with what I thought of the
speech. *WARNING* - it's from National Review Online, so all you folks who
are offended by opinions from a source to the right of Pravda, stop reading
now.
http://www.nationalreview.com/nr_comment/nr_comment112800a.shtml
America's Narrow Escape:Inside Al's Mind.
By John Derbyshire, NR contributing
editor----------------olimu@optonline.net
"It has been a damned nice thing ? the nearest run thing you
ever saw in your life, by God!"
? The Duke of Wellington, speaking of the battle of Waterloo
It is now clear that America has had a very narrow escape. The victory
of George W. Bush in this recent election can today, I think, be taken as
final. The Democratic party have yet to select from among themselves
the orderlies who will be delegated to drag Al Gore struggling and
howling from the public stage, but that is a formality. It's over, and we
have had a mighty close shave. We have escaped, very narrowly, having
Al Gore at the head of our executive branch. And that is a very fortunate
thing for this country, because Al Gore is a man with a serious problem.
The problem is located deeper in the vice president's psyche than I care
to look, but its chief external symptom is chronic and repetitive lying. I
cannot claim any originality for this observation, of course. Gore's lies
have been chronicled in detail over several months by my colleague John
J. Miller in National Review, and widely discussed in the public sphere.
I have read all that stuff, and heard it spoken of, and nodded, and said:
"Yeah, the guy's a liar. Hung around the Clintons too much." The size of
Al Gore's problem with the truth didn't come home to me until 8:55
Monday evening, though, when I sat down to watch him give his "We
must stand and fight!" speech. It was mesmerizing, and not a little scary,
to watch the lies go by one after another, like telegraph poles seen from
a train window.
? "That is all we have asked since Election Day: a complete
count of all the votes cast in Florida." Lie. They asked for a
"complete count" of the votes in only three counties, the
most heavily Democratic counties they could find. True,
Gore suggested a Florida-wide manual count at one ? just
precisely one ? point, a point well past Election Day, this
past three weeks, when he thought his situation was
desperate. Even that was done without much conviction,
though; and he wasn't asking for a statewide manual count,
he was just saying he would agree if the Bush people asked
for one.
? "Lawsuit after lawsuit has been filed to delay the count
and to stop the counting." Lie. No such lawsuits have been
filed. None of the manual recounts requested by the Gore
people has been delayed for one nanosecond by any
lawsuit that I am aware of.
? "This would have been over long since except for those
efforts to block the process at every turn." Lie. Once those
manual recounts were requested, by the Gore camp, the
process was bound to be drawn out until they were
complete. Nothing the Bush people have done has
prolonged that process, or blocked it. Why should we wish
to prolong it? We won. Three times. "This would have
been over long since" ... except for team Gore's
determination to keep counting until they found, or
manufactured, enough votes to wipe out Bush's lead.
? "Many thousands of votes that were cast on Election Day
have not yet been counted at all, not once." Lie. The only
Florida votes not yet counted are those absentee ballots
from the military that Gore's teams of lawyers were at such
pains to exclude from the counting process. There are not
"many thousands" of them, only a few hundred. All other
votes have been counted by machine at least twice.
? "In one county election officials brought the count to a
premature end in the face of organized intimidation." Lie.
This one is being put about with wild abandon by the
Gore-ites; I heard Ed Koch retailing it on the radio this
evening. It is a lie, a lie, a lie. David Leahy, the
decision-maker on the Miami-Dade County canvassing
board, has said on the record: "I was not intimidated." And
in fact, if it were true, the canvassing board itself would
have been at fault for not requesting law-enforcement
protection while they went on with their count.
? "This is America. When votes have been cast, we count
them. We don't arbitrarily set them aside because it's too
difficult to count them." Lie. Votes are very often not
counted in America. Vote counting is done by some very
small places on very small budgets. If the result of their
count will make no difference, a canvassing board will often
just not count. And votes that are too difficult for machines
to count are routinely set aside all over America.
Note that Al Gore's second sentence in that last lie actually makes no
grammatical sense. "...[A]rbitrarily...because it's too difficult to count
them." The setting aside would be arbitrary only if there were no reason
for it. The fact of them being too difficult to count is a reason. You may
not think it a good reason, and you may be right; but the fact of there
being a reason means that the setting aside was not "arbitrary".
Quite a lot of what Gore said was grammatical gibberish ? a sure sign
that one is dealing with a disturbed mind. Try this: "Whoever wins, the
victor will know that the American people have spoken in a voice mighty
by the whole of its integrity." Since "integrity" means "wholeness", that
last phrase is equivalent to "the whole of its wholeness". Even if we grant
that a voice can possess "wholeness" ? what would part of a voice
sound like, I wonder? ? what is signified by the whole of its
wholeness? Could the voice have been made mighty by only a part of its
wholeness? Or could it only have been made puny thereby? We are
gazing into the abyss here.
Similarly with this sentence: "In the end, in one of God's unforeseen
paths, this election may point us all to a new common ground." This
might approach close to having meaning if the second "in" were replaced
with "by", but it would still be an ugly mess, like the mind that
engendered it. Which presumably was Gore's: We are told that he writes
really critical speeches himself.
Our first shot of the podium at the National Naval Observatory from
which Gore made his speech showed no fewer than six American flags in
the background. Six flags, and it sure has been a great adventure for Al.
Now it's over, everything but the wormwood and the gall, neither of
which Al is quite ready to suck down yet. We have had one last, chilling
look into the mind of a man who, far from "bringing this country
together", would have taken us into a whole new dimension of division,
dishonesty, rancor, disorder, and mistrust. I say again: America has had
a narrow escape
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