Recount? What Recount?

We watched the HBO movie Recount tonight. The film tells the story of the fight to decide the Presidential election in 2000 in Florida. It's a gripping account of how the Republicans won Florida and how they then did everything in their power to ram rod the suspicious results through so that Bush Jr. could be made President.
Kevin Spacey did not chew as much scenery in this film as I thought he would and he deserves mucho credit for turning in a mostly restrained performance. In the case of this performance Spacey must have been reminded by director Jay Roach that less is more.

The rest of the cast turned in great performances as well, highlights among them were those turned in by Ed Begley Jr and Laura Dern. Republicans and her admirers will decry Dern's performance but she managed to make the dragon lady Kathryn Harris seem human, flawed and vain as the day is long, but human nonetheless.

What struck me about this film was how in the aftermath, the last eight years in fact, the Republican party, led by Bush and his lackey Karl Rove, has cried about "voter fraud" while it was them and their party that has perpetrated voter fraud by doing their damnedest to suppress the votes of blacks, Hispanics, and anyone else who traditionally votes for Democratic party candidates. They have engaged in purges of the voter rolls, in disqualifying absentee votes based on the thickness of the ballots, and a myriad of other underhanded and deceitful methods of denying legitimate voters their rights. When they say voter fraud what they mean is they want to make sure voters are defrauded out of their right to vote, especially if they are black and Hispanic.

The other thing that struck me, and I didn't realize it until Sparky pointed it out, was that there was no actual recount of all the votes in Florida. Some counties did machine recounts, that's letting machines recount the ballots, some only rechecked the totals on their voting machines, and we all remember the hand recounts of the ballots in a few counties that had hanging or dimpled chads. At no time was there a recount by all the counties in Florida where all the counties followed the same rules.

And to make matters even worse were the facts that Bush's brother was the Governor of the state in question and the person whose job it was to certify the results and declare a winner, Kathryn Harris, had a top position on Bush's Florida campaign. No conflict of interest there right? Right? "Yeah, right," he said sarcastically.

It's critical that we don't let something like this happen again in our country. So I suggest you help in getting as many people registered to vote as possible and that Democrats all over this country unite behind the person with the most delegates, Sen. Obama, and we all work to make him our next President. Those to Democrats who support the other candidate who say you'll vote for McCain if your woman is not nominated, I say you are traitors to the party of the people, to the party of JFK, RFK, LBJ, and FDR and you should go on and join the Quisling vipers like Joe Liberman, Zell Miller, and Ben Nighthorse Campbell and become Republicans in name to go with your Republican voting.