The Election of 2000 and Torture

I have to say, what surprises me is that people are surprised that Bush, Cheney & co. would torture people in the service of their political ends.

I have to admit, even I am a bit surprised by this...but, frankly, not as surprised as you might think. During and immediately after the election debacle of 2000, more than one of my friends joked about having an "intervention" in response to my outrage. And oh, boy, was I outraged. I was about as crazy with anger as a basically reasonable person can get. In fact, I never really understood why liberals were so passive about what happened. If Bush and Cheney didn't quite steal an election, they didn't exactly win it fair and square, either. Conservatives were out in force, protesting and screaming at the top of their lungs that Gore was attempting a coup, and that, should we attempt to oppose the Bush/Cheney quasi-coup, they (Republicans) wouldn't stand for it. Liberals did virtually nothing in response.

In the end, according to most--though not all-reasonable ways of counting the ballots, Bush won. But this is only one relevant fact. Equally relevant is the fact that the Bush/Cheney crew tried their damnedest to take the presidency regardless of the count. They violated their own past policies on ballot-counting, they ignored what all experts, including the counting-machine experts, knew about hand-recounts. They began repeating the false mantra that hand-counts were (to use James Baker's loathsomely dishonest term) "subjective." They deployed their mobile electronic command post in Florida, and shipped in their Young Republican thugs. The Florida legislature threatened not to certify Democratic electors should Gore win a recount.

The GOP exhibited a willingness to steal the election. In the end, perhaps the only thing that kept them from stealing it was the fact that it was probably theirs anyway--though they didn't know that. They were like a man who, not knowing whether he or his brother has been bequeathed the car, hops in it and speeds away, intending to keep it no matter what. The fact that he later finds out it has, in fact, been bequeathed to him does not change the fact that he is, at heart, a thief.

During the battle over the recount, we saw what they were made of.

What surprised me then and has never stopped surprising me is that liberals could have been so passive about what was very close to being an attempted theft of the presidency. And what surprises me now is that any of the subsequent Bush/Cheney atrocities could really surprise anyone very much after after the initial one. It has been suggested to me that my view of such things is naive, and that could be true for all I know. But I've always thought that a group of people who would be willing to so closely approximate stealing the presidency would be willing to do virtually anything. What we saw from them then was a flash of viciousness and dishonesty so intense that I came to wonder whether any crimes were beyond them. The answer, it seems, is: apparently not.

I have friends, and very intelligent and well-meaning ones, who thought that we should simply shrug and try to make the best of the Bush/Cheney reign. I never thought that was the right attitude. And--just for the record--I'm inclined to think that--should it turn out that the administration did, in fact, torture people in order to hunt for links between Iraq and al Qaeda--my somewhat hyperbolic-seeming outrage will turn out to have been justified.