Who doesn't wish they could have witnessed George Bush's reaction to Al Gore's phone call in the early morning hours of November 8th. "Uh, Governor, you know that concession I made about an hour ago? ...uh-huh... yeah. Well I just called to tell you I'm, uh... going to have to take it back? Well, you don't have to get snippy about it."

I'll bet Bush's blood pressure approached maximum capacity. The man was hydroed. You know he was. I have little doubt that GW would have throttled Gore on the spot if he had delivered the message in person. In the days that followed, however, George Bush and Dick Cheney were dignified. Bush headed for the ranch. He took walks. He went to church. These last few weeks were an immersion course in humility and patience for the man who often looked just a bit too cocky on the campaign trail.

George Bush may have taken the high road, almost Zen-like as he walks the path to the White House. All the best to him, but I can't say that I've chosen the serenity route during this bizarre waiting period.

I'd pretty much had it by the time the Justices of Hazzard County re-wrote the Florida election laws a week and a half ago, sending Al Gore's dog and pony show into full swing. I would have paid someone to make dog food out of the pony and put that puppy to rest.

In fact, I went red meat Republican on a co-worker early this week. All that talk about toning down the rhetoric? All the admonishments from Democrats on the teevee? Well, I guess I wasn't listening. My colleague had just remarked, for about the third or fourth time, in a cool and very reasonable manner, "It's just that if someone takes the trouble to go and vote, they deserve to have their vote counted. Every vote should be counted."

He was ticking me off.

"You know, BOB, if someone can take the trouble to go and vote, do you think they might also just trouble themselves to punch the hole through the card? No one's asking them to go an extra mile, just an extra 1/16th of an inch and push that pin all the way through! After they brave the Florida blizzards to make it to a polling place, would it be just too damn much trouble to actually make a hole in a card? Huh? Would it?"

"Look," he responded, in an admirably measured tone, "All I'm saying is that I think every vote ought to be counted...." I don't think I have to tell you where this conversation went. Suffice it to say that by the end of our discussion, Bob requested, only half-jokingly, that he not be left alone in a room with me for the rest of the evening.

A few hours later I was greeted with a reminder of our heated exchange. This time it wasn't Lieberman calling on demonstrators to pack it in and shut the hell up. Nor was it Jesse Jackson ripping into protesters who, he gallingly claimed, intimidated the Miami-Dade canvassing board into shutting down their recount. It wasn't even Jerrold Nadler toning down the rhetoric by likening the Florida protesters to Nazis. This time it was none other than that font of goodwill, Molly Ivins, in a piece from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Ivins, the woman who never met a talking point she couldn't mangle, put her own good ol' girl spin on the latest one from the Gore camp. She could have merely recited the week's Democrat mantra, "tone down the rhetoric," the way that Congressman Eliot Engel did. He repeated the phrase six times in an interview with Paula Zahn. No. Instead, Ivins wrapped her countrified wit around the DNC marching order, dressed it in gingham, and drawled,

"Keep this up and we're going to have a whole country full of people who cannot discuss what is indeed a very close and exciting election without becoming all red in the face, the tendons in their necks popping out and their wattles shaking like a turkey gobbler's."

Damn straight. The tendons in my neck do protrude when I talk to apologists for Gore's election heist and much as I'd like to think that I haven't got wattles, they would certainly be shaking during my conversations with Bob (a man who I believe must have a shrine to Hillary Clinton somewhere in his humble quarter million dollar shanty).

What is it, you ask, that can turn a mild-mannered, geeky ex-Democrat like me into an extra chromosomal Republican pit bull? It's the defilement. I've watched the most corrupt administration in decades debase the office of the Presidency for the past eight years and I haven't been stricken blind by it. Much to the contrary it's been most enlightening by way of showing me just what hypocrisy my liberal brethren have been capable of.

It's truth itself that Al Gore and the Clintons seem to regard with such contempt. It's the way they lie for what seem to be mere recreational purposes.

It's the outrage.

There are those who say that twisting the truth was something that Al Gore learned at the knee of Bill Clinton, but in reality his Vice-Surrealness began playing fast and loose with the facts long before the Clintons ever entered the picture. If Gore learned anything at the knee of Bill Clinton, it was deny, deny, deny. That's why the spectacle in Florida is bleeding it's way up to the U.S. Supreme Court this afternoon. And that's why a good portion of the people who voted for Al Gore three and half weeks ago see him in a new and eerie light these days.

Al Gore won't concede. The facts are with George Bush. Bush won the election, but facts have been reduced to elusive and almost ethereal concepts in these past eight years of Clintomania. In spite of substantial public opinion that Gore should step aside and that he's chosen a strange and deluded path that he believes will take him to the Oval Office, it still doesn't quell the possibility, however diminishing, that he could still manage to pull off the great election heist.

He could, that is, if the outrage subsides, which is why I make no apologies for the passion I carry into this debate. I don't regret the fact that my voice is raised or that my blood gets up when I think about it. I refuse to tone it down. I refuse to calm down and I refuse to turn a blind eye to the desecration that dragged us into the pit of Al Gore's presidential fantasy.

© Lynette Warren 2000 All rights reserved


Previously by Lynette Warren...

The Great Florida Vote Hunt (11/24/00)