"But the biggest clue about what they were up to came in 2000 with the Florida recount."

[ProSense]

Machiavelli's Inbred Children

by digby

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But the biggest clue about what they were up to came in 2000 with the Florida recount. I know it seems like ancient history to go back to that but it is extremely important to remember just how outrageous their tactics were: the Gore campaign used legal tactics and the Bush campaign didn't…

The Republicans have been remarkably good about keeping their mouths shut about the Florida shennanigans, pretending that Jeb Bush's electoral apparatus gave them no unusual help. Still, I was surprised to see a former Florida recount icon show up on the Lehrer News Hour last week to argue that the US Attorney firings were completely above board. His name is Michael Carvin and he was the lawyer who argued the Bush case before the Florida Supreme Court. Here's his picture. I'm sure many of you will remember him:


The Newshour failed to identify him as one of the Florida recount team and instead named him merely as a former Reagan official. But he didn't fail to carry the Bush water one more time:
MICHAEL CARVIN: I really think this is much ado about very little. I'm not saying that they haven't mishandled this from a public relations perspective. They clearly have…

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This would be typical Carvin. For instance, here's something he said after Bush v Gore was decided:

The new deadline for all recounts to be submitted to Katherine Harris was 5 p.m. Sunday, November 26. Now, that Sunday afternoon you could watch any of the television coverage and see that Palm Beach was still counting. And by late afternoon you heard various officials in Palm Beach acknowledging that they were not going to be finished by five. Now, we maintain that was completely illegal, because the law said you had to manually recount all ballots. Village Voice top five outrages for why this is such a slimy position for him to take.

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They were clearly colluding with Katherine Harris' office throughout and they determined that she could reject all of the Palm Beach county votes they had counted by 5pm with this little gambit. Everything depended on not allowing Al Gore to ever take the lead or their whole PR campaign would start to fall apart.

It's a small thing, I know, and probably one of thousands of such small acts of illegal and inappropriate collusion between Jeb Bush and the campaign during the recount. But it happened and we knew it happened. And it was done by people like Michael Carvin, former Reagan Justice Department official who now implies that the US Attorney scandal is nothing because everyone knows that the Bush Justice department is an enforcement arm of the Republican Party and that's perfectly normal.

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