Posted on 09/19/2012 4:01:30 PM PDT by DallasBiff
- At 5:00 p.m. on September 11, 2001, an ashen-faced but composed President Al Gore stepped into the East Room of the White House to deliver a televised address to the nation. With him were former presidents Clinton and Bush, as well as Texas governor George W. Bush—flown to Washington from Dallas on a military jet, his first visit back to the capital after the close race that lost him the presidency just months before.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
I pray that Romney wins by a big margin.
If not, it will be hire the unemployed lawyer act of 2012.
The hanging chad will become hanging “Chad.”
"...in the opinion of most independent observers, this is the single most confusing, bewildering, incipherable document ever produced. To begin with, how do you know which side to vote on? [ holds it up on one side ] Is this right-side up? [ flips it over ] Or is this right-side up? The ballot doesn't say. And what's with all these confusing names? Bush. Gore. Buchanan. Nader. And confusing party affiliations. Democrat. Republican. Reform. Here's one called "Green". And here's more names. George. Patrick. Albert. John. John. There's two different Johns. I mean, who on earth could figure this out.But to really understand how confusing this ballot is, you have to take a closer look. Here it is. [ close-up is shown ] Now, for the love of God, what are all these dots? And these arrows? If you look closely, you will see that tips of the arrow points to a dot...but the shaft of the arrow points back to a name. So how do you vote? Do you circle a candidate's name? Do you underline it? Or do you write it on the arrow? Or underneath? Or maybe it's the dots. Do you write the candidate's name on the dots? They seem sort of small. Maybe just his initials. Or do you color in the dots? If so, in what color? Maybe you scratch the dots with the edge of a penny. Or lick the dots. Again, this ballot does not spell it out. I went to Harvard - I couldn't make heads or tails of this. [ puts ballot away ]
Just imagine what it was like for the most vulnerable residents of Palm Beach. [ holds up photo ] This is Esther Rosenthal. Esther Rosenthal is age 92, a Democrat all her life. Esther left her nursing home Tuesday morning intending to vote for me! Totally bewildered by this ballot, she ended up voting for the Libertarian candidate, and switching her long-distance service to Sprint. [ holds up next photo ] Okay.. Sidney and Reesa Mandel, age 87 and 85, ate their ballot! [ holds up next photo ] While Rachel Goldensten, age 96, mailed hers to Barbra Streisand..."
-- A Message From The Vice-President Of The United States
As heard on Saturday Night Live, November 11, 2000
Greenfield’s book was a real disappointment.
How so, if you don’t mind spoiling it?
Bookmark
I have said for months that the REASON the polls are being jimmied is NOT to depress our vote, or even to inspire the welfare class. It is to set the table for de-legitimizing Romney’s presidency. (”How could Romney win? The polls ALL said that he was way behind. He must have cheated.”)
Brings to mind the writer in NY (her name escapes me at the moment) who said of Richard Nixon “I don’t see how he won; I don’t know anyone who voted for him”.
I do not know if America is strong enough after having a blood sucking parasite sucking at the tit for 4 years to survive.
Muslims are strong, ready, and willing to walk in and take away our HBO.
No HBO? Now then will the sheep get pissed.
I always remind moon bat libtards when they claim the SCOTUS stole the election from Owl Gore he did not even win his own home state and if he did Florida would be a moot point...
So quit your bitching....libtards
Fairy tale for sure. Ghey even.
I could see having an interesting conversation about what would have happened if JFK had been shot 3 years earlier, or if RFK hadn't been killed in 1968, or if Gerald Ford had been reelected. You might get a good short paper or sketch out of it, but I can't see carrying it much further than that.
Maybe it's just me. Maybe there's a big market for 448 page collections of 100+ page counterfactual histories. But I'm thinking in speculative stuff like this you can make the point in 20 pages or so, and the rest is just padding. Also, if I wanted to read for several hours about Lyndon Johnson, or Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford, I'd probably want to read about the real one, not about a half-fictional one (though maybe a wholly fictionalized Ford would be more interesting than the real one).
If you know anything about Jeff Greenfield, you probably know what he'd think about a Robert Kennedy presidency. If you've participated in discussions about recent political history, you can probably guess what a Ford victory in 1976 would have meant. So the only one that's a real mystery is what would have happened if LBJ had taken office in 1961 instead of in 1963.
Finally, another good reason for keeping these things short is if they aren't, a lot of snarkiness and wish-fullfillment creeps in. The further the narrative gets away from reality, the more opportunities there are to reward one's friends and punish one's enemies, to settle scores and live out one's own dreams. For me, personally, I'd rather have read a bunch of shorter "what-if" pieces than try to slog through what Greenfield actually wrote. But it could be that's just me. Plus, if you call your novellas "stunning" in the title, you're asking for put-downs.
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