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 lways
on the cutting edge of news reporting, eight months after last November's
presidential election, the New York Times confirmed on Sunday
that, in fact, George Walker Bush is a legitimate president. In
no less than five news stories, the Times tells us what really
happened in Florida, i.e., Bush won the large majority of overseas
military votes, but many of those votes shouldn't have counted.
Nonetheless, Bush would have won Florida anyway.
The Times spent an enormous amount of time and money sorting
this out for us, culminating yesterday in not one but five
news stories on the subject: "How Bush Took Florida: Mining the
Overseas Absentee Vote"; "Lieberman Put Democrats in Retreat on
Military Vote"; "Timely but Tossed Votes Were Slow to Get to
the Ballot Box"; and "How the Ballots Were Examined."
There you have it. Bush won the presidency. He's legitimate after
all. Actually, if you think about it, Bush has won this presidency
at least half a dozen times — recount after recount, media
ballot analysis after media ballot analysis.
However, I do have one lingering question for the New York
Times: Who really won the 1960 presidential election? Yes,
I know history records that John Kennedy beat Richard Nixon by about
100,000 votes. But unlike Al Gore last November, Nixon didn't challenge
the result, despite voter fraud in Illinois and Texas. He didn't
bring lawsuits challenging the ballot-counting methods of local
and state officials, he didn't demand recounts, he didn't seek more
time for conducting recounts, and he didn't try to exclude votes
that went to his opponent in hopes that some judge, somewhere, would
reverse the outcome.
So, the question isn't whether George Bush won the 2000 presidential
election, but whether JFK won the 1960 presidential election. I
wonder when the New York Times will get around to checking
that out?
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