http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jan/29/uselections2000.usa

The Ohio question involved voting machines in the 2004 election. Bush won the popular vote nationally, but if Ohio had switched, Kerry would have been elected. Diebold the voting machine manufacturer was a big Bush supporter. The vote in Ohio and their were questions about some of the machine totals.

Yes, several officials were convicted in Ohio if I remember right. And in Florida one of the scandals was around voter suppression via invalid purging of the roles that targeted Dem leaning demographics. Plus there was Sandra Day O’Connor saying that she wanted Bush to win so that she could retire from the Supreme Court. Of course she didn’t then recuse herself for the obvious conflict of interest from the decision that saw Bush selected by the SC 5-4.

Now Gore gave up when he had other avenues to challenge the result, but anyone who thinks Bush won fare and square has been at the blue pills again.

I do not know who has it right over Florida (there are too many legal ins and outs), but the national popular vote was with Gore, and it’s clear that a majority in Florida wanted to vote for Gore.

I seem to remember there being a question over corruption in the counting of votes in another state too at the time. Ohio maybe?

President Bush’s favorability among Republicans is 77%, so it’s not clear that he’s responsible for his younger sibling’s low-energy primary candidacy. (President Bush’s favorability among the general public (45%) is better than Hillary Clinton’s, and within the margin of error behind Obama’s.)

In 2000, President Bush won the Florida vote, and thus the election, under the rules in effect at the time votes were cast. It’s not the case that subsequent investigations showed that Gore won Florida. The most they could do was show that if you twisted the rules enough in various ways favorable to Gore, you could eventually come up with certain scenarios that went his way.

Needless to say, we’ll have to agree to disagree on your assessment of President Bush’s service.

“Decent” men don’t torture. Decent men don’t cook the evidence in order to invade a country that had not attacked us, with weapons against which they had no defense, killing many thousands of innocents. Bush is an ignorant, privileged bully who not only presided over one of the greatest foreign policy debacles in American history, but whose crony capitalism brought on one of the worst economic disasters also. What is “decent” about that? There is no doubt that Gore won the popular vote in 2000, and subsequent investigations showed that he won the vote in Florida, but there was not a statewide recount due to the machinations of his governor brother and the partisanship of the majority on the Supreme Court. One good measure of how much GWB is admired in the US today is how Jeb is doing in the Republican primary, in spite of the millions poured into his campaign by his fat cat supporters. You can be sure he is even less popular with Dems.

It’s the blue pill, Heather. Can’t argue successfully with with someone who’s sense of reality is driven by by ideology. Facts just don’t matter. As Harris says: “If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?”

Why do you always have to make personal insults about those with a different opinion to you?

I agree GWB is a decent man, and I never said otherwise. Being good and decent doesn’t make you right.

Man-made climate change isn’t a delusion of elites and pressure groups – it is science that is accepted by a majority of scientists, most world leaders, and the populations of most countries consider it a serious problem. The Republican party in the US is an international outlier – they are the only major political party in the world that denies man-made climate change.

Gallup is a polling agency with a reputation for accuracy and integrity in the way it conducts its polls. Not liking the result of a poll doesn’t change that.

Since Kyoto is offered as an explanation for pre-9/11 Bush Derangement Syndrome, it is only fair to note that although Clinton ostensibly approved it, he never got around to submitting it for ratification. The reason for that is simple: The Senate preemptively passed a resolution repudiating it. (The vote was not merely bipartisan but indeed was unanimous.)

If this episode is the genesis of international Bush Derangement Syndrome, so be it. The president’s job is to represent the will of the people of his own country, not to appease international elites and pressure groups. (No doubt President Bush was heartbroken at losing the Greenpeace endorsement.) We’ll never know to what extent a President Gore might have been able to foist his climate change ideology on America, because the Democrats failed, thankfully, in their cynical ploy to overturn the election by rigging rules after the fact.

Millions of people in this country and around the world deeply admire President Bush as one of the most decent men ever to hold that office, and we will be forever grateful for his extraordinary leadership during a difficult time. If that sentiment doesn’t register in Gallup polls or Nobel nominations or Davos cocktail party chatter — good. So much the better.

And if Canada likes Obama, they can have him.

Thanks for the info. Interesting stuff.

“The corruption of that election was quite shocking to us…”

And to quite a few of us Americans, too.