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Thanks,
Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist
http://www.konformist.com
Printed from http://www.thenation.com
© 2001 The Nation Company, L.P.
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FEATURE STORY | December 17, 2001
Times Cries Eke! Buries Al Gore
by GORE VIDAL
The late Murray Kempton once noted that although the New York Times
likes to pose as being above the battle, this position has never
stopped the Times, once the battle's fought, from sneaking onto the
field and shooting the wounded. November 12, krauthammers at the
ready, Times persons swept through the electoral swamps of Florida,
shooting those survivors who questioned "President" Bush's alleged
plurality.
In the old Soviet Union, various Russian friends were often
surprisingly well informed about the world despite the fact that
their view of it was largely shaped by their New York Times, Pravda.
When asked how do you find out what's really going on, they would
give secret smiles: "You must know how to read Pravda." Now the USSR
is gone and we are on our own, trying to sort out our Pravda's often
contradictory mendacities, on such lurid view a few weeks ago in an
edition that contained three or four not exactly synoptic tales of
the findings of a "ballot review conducted for a consortium of news
organizations." Apparently, 175,010 ballots from throughout Florida
were examined. As always, when the Times's dread sharpshooters are
slithering across a bloody no-man's land, one must first deconstruct
the headline for clues. "Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds
Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote." So much for those
conspiracy theorists who dared attack the Court's interference in the
election when the Court was, simply, as always, anticipating the will
of the majority of those people that the Court has, from the very
first admiralty suits of the original Republic to now, cherished--
property owners. Wall Street Journal headline: "In Election Review,
Bush Wins Without Supreme Court Help." Conspiracy? No. They all think
alike.
The story: Paragraph one: "A comprehensive review of the uncounted
Florida ballots from last year's presidential election reveals that
George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court
had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the
Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward." That's pretty
plain. State was always for Bush. No point in wading any farther into
the joint prose of sharpshooters Ford Fessenden and John Broder (the
second name suggests that the hereditary principle is at work not
only at the presidential level but even at the humblest journalistic
one--but since John M. is not related to David M., was he, like a
pope, obliged to change his name from...whatever?).
Paragraph two: "Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice
President Al Gore have charged..." Note "partisan." Ugly word. Do
anything to win. We know about them. Bushites compassionate. Dumb
maybe but real nice. Sincere. "...close examination of the ballots"
found that Mr. Bush would have won if the Florida court's order to
recount had not been reversed by the Supreme Court. This is bald,
bold. True? Keep reading the Times.
Paragraph three: Gist: Even if Gore had got his four-county hand
count, which the Supreme Court denied him, Bush would have kept his
lead. Get that, sore losers? Real Americans hate a sore loser. You
may stop reading this story now because...
Paragraph four: The Times's two scouts step on a landmine. Watch two
scouts explode. "But the consortium, looking at a broader group of
rejected ballots than those covered in the court decisions...found
that Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full
statewide recount of all the rejected ballots.... The findings
indicate that Mr. Gore might have eked out a victory...." Only
someone truly slimy "ekes." A real man wins big with a 5-to-4
vote. "...if he had pursued in court a course like the one he
publicly advocated when he called on the state to 'count all the
votes.'" So after paragraph three's firm Bush wins without Supreme
Court, the Times, on further evidence, finds Gore "eking" out a
victory. What next?
Paragraphs five and six: "In addition, the review found statistical
support for the complaints of many voters, particularly elderly
Democrats in Palm Beach County," that the ballot was so confusing
that "more than 113,000 voters cast ballots for two or more
presidential candidates. Of those, 75,000 chose Mr. Gore and a minor
candidate; 29,000 chose Mr. Bush and a minor candidate." Justice
Sandra Day O'Connor, no fan of the inept lower orders, went on
record: The butterfly ballot certainly seemed clear to her. But the
Times story has now gone off the rails, and I suspect that at this
point good Howell Raines, the new executive editor, must have
realized that his gunmen were shooting themselves in the feet. So
this sentence was added to...clarify? annul? any suggestion that the
ballot design was deliberately flawed, leaving the bewildered
consortium to conclude that since "there was no clear indication of
what the voters intended, those numbers were not included in the
consortium's final tabulations." So here we are in paragraph five of
what paragraph one told us was "a comprehensive review," only to
learn that a significant number of ballots were not counted because
the voter, confused by the design of the ballot, voted for both Gore
and the Vegetarian candidate! So there is, we are assured, no way of
knowing which of the two was wanted. No way? Surely the fact that
Gore's name was listed first suggests that he was the voter's choice,
unless, maddened by a surfeit of broccoli, his name was so placed as
a tease.
As these paragraphs unfurl, the newspaper of cracked record begins to
resemble one of Robert Benchley's hilarious movie shorts of
yesteryear, The Treasurer's Report.
Paragraph seven: recklessly concedes that "the most thorough
examination of Florida's uncounted ballots provides ammunition for
both sides...but it also provides support for the result: a Bush
victory by the tiniest of margins." No, Howell, it doesn't, as this
fabulous story makes clear.
Paragraph eight: The Times starts to implode. First, a major
concession. The consortium of eight news organizations, aided by
professional statisticians, found that "under some methods [of
recounting--which ones?] Mr. Gore would have emerged the winner; in
others, Mr. Bush." Paragraph nine: The Times digs a trap and falls
into it. Quotes from the Supreme Court's majority opinion denying
Florida a full recount, as ordered by the Florida courts, on the
ground that such a recount "using varying standards" (there are no
standards other than varying in Florida) threatened "irreparable
harm" to Mr. Bush. Yes. He would have been sent home to Crawford.
With paragraph ten the Times rationale becomes surreal: "The
consortium's study shows that Mr. Bush would have won even if the
justices had not stepped in...." Too late, Howell. Too little.
Schizophrenia now reigns in Times Square. Paragraphs eleven through
thirteen quibble about voting machines. Fourteen repeats how Gore
should have demanded a statewide count and how wise the Bushites were
to resist. Paragraph fifteen: "In a finding rich with irony" (a vein
of metal inaccessible to Times miners), "the results show that even
if Mr. Gore succeeded in his effort to force recounts of undervotes
in the four Democratic counties...he still would have lost.... a
statewide recount could have produced enough votes to tilt the
election his way" (a mere tilt? Well, that's one way of putting
it) "no matter what standard was chosen to judge voter intent."
Finally, paragraph sixteen: "A New York Times investigation earlier
this year showed that 680 of the late-arriving [overseas] ballots did
not meet Florida's standards yet were still counted. The vast
majority of those flawed ballots were accepted in counties that
favored Mr. Bush after an aggressive effort by Bush strategists to
pressure officials to accept them." I then got out this earlier story
(July 15, 2001). It is somewhat less homogenized than the current
account. "In an analysis of the 2,490 [overseas] ballots...the Times
found 680 questionable votes," of which "four out of five were
accepted in counties carried by Mr. Bush," making him victor by 537
votes. Yet on July 15 the Times felt "all [680 votes] would have been
disqualified had the state's election laws been strictly enforced." I
suggest that the editors, to show good faith, should have used
paragraph sixteen as their lead paragraph: Start with the crime and
then unravel it--or deep-six it if that's your plan. Putting it as
the coda to a confusing story suggests a desire to obscure, not
illuminate, what happened.
In the end, thanks to the acceptance of 680 illegal ballots,
Bush "won" by 537 votes, since at least that number were counted,
rightly or wrongly, for Bush, otherwise--brace yourselves--why should
such obviously illegal ballots be counted at all by his partisans?
Put another way, if other magical counters had counted these ballots
for Gore that would have taken away 537 votes from Bush's tally and
given them to Gore, who would then, depsite the Supreme Court's
ominous meddling, have become the 43rd President. The Times, having
consulted the Delphic oracle and, presumably, a thorough examination
of a mad cow's entrails, called in a Harvard "expert" who wisely
opined--a word creeping into newspaper jargon on "eke's" shoulders--
that there was no way to declare a winner with "mathematical
certainty." That man was worth his fee.
November 12 was quite a day at the Times. After the Fessenden/Broder
front-page story, there was the Richard Berke story headed "Who Won
Florida? The Answer Emerges, but Surely Not the Final Word." I'll
say. Where Fessenden/Broder begin with "A comprehensive review" of
the ballots, Berke begins on a note of triumph. He changes the
article "A" to "The comprehensive review of..." etc. This may be much
the same story, but it still sounds a bit thin as it tries to
convince us that all is well in a wonderful world because after "the
drama of those 36 days last fall, most of the country moved on long
ago," marching as to war, one might say. September 11 is referred to
as the moment of truth for all patriots, and "many partisan Democrats
are loath to question the legitimacy of a president in wartime." The
writer mentions President Grover Cleveland's defeat in 1888--won
popular vote, lost Electoral College, re-elected four years later.
Case not applicable. Cleveland was not robbed of election like Gore.
A closer analogy is with New York Governor Samuel Tilden--a Democrat--
who won the election of 1876 with a plurality of a quarter-million
votes and then was well and truly robbed of the election by the
Republican Party, whose troops still occupied parts of the South....
etc. Since the Times refers to its victories, I shall draw the
reader's attention to my novel 1876, in which I describe how the
election of that year was hijacked and how Tilden went quietly, as
did Gore. Tilden was never heard of again.
The most depressing aspect of this whole story is how little interest
the people seem to have in the unconstitutional usurpation of a
presidential election by a rogue Supreme Court majority. It is also
striking how little moved they are by the rights we are so rapidly
losing in the never-to-be-won war against never-to-be-
defined "terrorism." The current confusions of the New York Times are
not so much that paper's usual problems with honest reporting but
what looks to be a perfect indifference to the welfare of this
Republic, as opposed to corporate cheerleading for the new homeland
that November 2000, not September 2001, made possible. Meanwhile,
Vice President Cheney, in his "undisclosed" bunker, is no doubt
wondering whether or not to postpone the certain-to-be-divisive
presidential election of 2004. After all, homeland security comes
first.
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