Jake Tapper, "Down & Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency"
Holy hell.
That took me eight days to finish. Eight days! I don�t think any book has ever taken me that long to finish. And the funny thing was, this was pretty damn good and I wanted to finish reading it, but I kept getting interrupted. Interrupted by work, interrupted by that Faction show on Friday, interrupted by friends coming over and me going to the movies.
When I did finally have some free time to try and read, I would usually be too tired to finish more than 20 pages. As each day ticked past, I was feeling more and more like the guy in The Twilight Zone, from the �Time Enough At Last� episode where he finally gets the chance to read, because everybody else is dead. That guy broke his glasses and starts weeping like a little girl, and we�re supposed to realize that people need people, even when they may seem inconvenient.
Well, I�ve broken my glasses several times and I still wear them. And besides, places like Longs Drugs have those reading glasses that they sell for five bucks. Not that I�d need to pay for them, since everybody would be dead!
You know, what with us bombing the shit out of one country, getting ready to bomb the hell out of another, planes flying into buildings, energy companies and super K-marts going bankrupt, the stock market going to hell, and George Lucas slapping Star Wars fans in the face yet again, we as a country have kind of forgotten all the crap that went down in that last election. You don�t see many stickers around anymore that have the simple slogan that summed it all up: �BUSH LOST.�
So this book is a good one for review, if only to make you mad all over again. But if you�re looking for a Bush Bashing Book, this isn�t the one. As Tapper (from Salon.com) details the entire sordid process, and as you watch both sides play Lawyer Ball back and forth, it turns out that, get this: both sides are scumbags!
Big surprise there, huh? Woah! Who woulda thunk it?
The republican side gets downright vicious with their tactics, attempting to freeze out anybody who is not on their side while making promises to those that will help expedite the process by shutting down the recounts. This worked perfectly, making Gore seem like a whiner and people generally got sick of it carrying on even though they didn�t know what was holding everything up.
I mean really, what would have been the final recount was stopped in the middle of counting by the republican-heavy Supreme Court. When the districts were told they could resume counting, it came with one stipulation: all the counting had to be finished in 12 hours, which would have been possible — IF THE FUCKING COURT HADN�T STOPPED THE COUNTING IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!
Tapper says it wouldn�t have mattered anyway, and that Gore would have still lost those particular counties by a little over 100 votes, but as he puts it: �Democrats can be so fucking sloppy.� What they should have done from the beginning was to demand a statewide re-vote, which while I�m no economics expert, seems like it would have been cheaper than the three million they spent on looking for here a chad, there a chad, everywhere a chad, chad.
Really though, having the subtitle �The Plot to Steal the Presidency� is nothing short of hyperbole. This is a straight chronology of the events that took place, and it�s a well-written and informative one.
Finally at the end, he gives a fairly lame argument that maybe, �we have seen the enemy and he is us.� In other words, maybe we are the ones who let the political process get so absurdly out of control.
I don�t buy it. After all, I voted for Ralph Nader. And Larry Flynt.
