And .. just to add a little more light to the already great comments:
One year after the 2000 election (as the law provides), several left-wing media outlets pooled their money and petitioned for a recount in Florida. They had to pool their money because it is very costly to have such a thing done.
The recount went forward - and the media was silent about it. After the recount was finished - a teeny, tiny article appeared in the back of the WP. Bush had won FL with over 1500 votes .. not 537. Hmmmm ..?? Looks like the dems were really trying to steal the election.
As you would guess .. most of the public didn’t know anything about it. That’s why the left kept saying Bush stole the election - because they had kept the recount a secret.
One morning while watching FOX, one of the liberal hacks, Bob Beckel, made a comment about “... Bush stole the election”.
I went ballistic in my living room and sat down at my computer and typed out the FACTS - including the little article about the media’s recount. I also took Bob to task for spreading LIES about Bush.
To this day, I cannot stand the sight of Bob Beckel; and I always press MUTE when I see his face.
Some other memories of the 2000 election:
* Bush had a comfortable lead of about 4% over Gore in all the major pre-election polls, until the weekend before the election a democratic operative pedaled a traffic citation from 1977 in which GWB had hit a mailbox in a single car accident. The MSM inferred this was evidence of drunken-driving and spent the entire 3 days before the election speculating on GWB’s alcohol habits on all major newcasts. This coordinated smear campaign is what made the election close.
* The Florida panhandle is in a later time zone than the rest of the state, and the panhandle counties are very heavily republican. The MSM all called Florida for Gore well before the polls closed in the panhandle counties, which had the effect of supressing voter turnout there. Statistical analysis has shown that this cost Bush 10s of thousands of votes which would have made the state not even close.
* I personally viewed the 2000 election as a bit of a political epiphany. Though I’d always been aware of the news media bias in analysis (a roundtable discussion panel would consists of a moderate republican and three democrats), I had always thought that facts were facts and all journalists were professional enough not to lie about basic facts. On election night 2000, my brother told me about a website called “Free Republic” that was posting actual unfiltered election information. A few weeks later, I was on a business trip to DC and joined a hardy group of Freepers outside the Naval Observatory in chanting ‘Out of Cheney’s House’. We made the local 11pm news and I was a hero at my business meeting the next day (at a defense contractor). Meanwhile, my 4 year old son made his liberal pre-school teacher’s head explode by drawing pictures of “Al Gore stealing elections” in class. By January 2001, I had forever cancelled my NPR subscription, and was lobbying my local cable company for Fox News.
Ah, the memories ...
I feel sheepish writing this, but this is the very first time I've read that Bush won by anything MORE than 537 votes.