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| Clowning around in Broward county |
Remember Broward? It was ground zero for the recount of the vote in Bush v Gore 2000.
Now it's ground zero for a couple of consequential midterm elections, for governor and senator.
What's with Broward?
Some are talking of the parallels with 2000, but not making the obvious point.
The obvious point being Greenies' responsibility for that result. Obvious to me anyway. Not, it seems, to the MSM or even the blogosphere, as noone is taking about it.
You remember that 2000 recount was stopped by the Supreme Court on the matter of equal treatment? The court found that there was not a consistent way of counting a vote — what with hanging chads, pregnant chads, poked and prodded chads — so equal treatment required that the vote recounting stop entirely.
Result: W Bush won by 90 votes. The number he'd been in front at the start of the Broward recount.
90 votes. Keep that in mind. [Later: actually 538 votes. But still, my point remains]
Because here's the thing: there was a third party in the race. Remember Ralph Nader? He stood for the Green Party.
Nader won about 90,000 votes in Florida. (IIRC. I'm not going to Google it because the number is about right and will do for my point. Later: 97,488 votes).
If Nader had not been in the race pretty much all of those votes would have gone to Gore. Greenies tend Democrat not Republican, if they don't have a Green candidate, I think that's pretty well accepted.
But it didn't need all those votes to go to Gore. It didn't even need 10% (9,000). Or even 1% (900). Just 0.1% of those votes going to Gore would have put Al in the White House.
(Later: given the corrections above, the figure is more like 0.55%. But still, makes the point, because closer to 100% would have gone to Gore, from Nader)
So it's pretty clear to me that Nader kept Gore from the White House.
If Nader had not stood, and with President Gore in power, when 9-11 happened, the response would have been, not war with Iraq, but sending Special Forces to Afghanistan to rout Osama BIn Ladin. How do we know this? Because that's what Gore said at the time. And also what made sense.
Imagine the different world we would be in if the US had not invaded Iraq.
That we don't have that different world is down to the Greenies. It's absolutely down to the Greenies. Not that they meant that to happen. But good intentions don't matter. What matters is the actual result in the real world.
It's telling that, to this day, Nader desperately denies that his candidacy had had any effect on Bush v Gore.
He's feelin guilty, innit?!
Cause he did. He did impact world history. And not in a good way.
No doubt about it.
Sent from my iPhone
