9/11 Made the Media Whitewash What Really Happened in Bush v. Gore

[Galraedia]

By now nearly everybody, with the exception of a handful of Bush administration leftovers, understands that the September 11 attacks induced some form of mass psychosis into the American polity. The contours of this understanding vary. Nearly everybody now agrees that the post-9/11 impulse to divide the world into a Manichaean contest between Islamic terrorism and democracy was tragically misguided. A smaller group of Americans understands that the rally-around-the-flag atmosphere canonized and empowered a series of deeply unworthy figures, ranging from Rudy Giuliani to Dick Cheney to George W. Bush, on the basis of their ability to act out some ideal of masculinity.

Yet there remains one important post-9/11 belief that has yet to undergo significant revision: the comforting fallacy that George W. Bush won the 2000 election more or less fairly.

Bush won the election because five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices overruled the Florida State Supreme Court and blocked a statewide ballot recount. A consortium of newspapers undertook its own recount. By an unfortunate accident of timing, those results came out in November 2001, when post-attack hysteria was at an apogee. A broad bipartisan consensus held that the paramount national imperative was to unify behind a president protecting the country from existential and ongoing threats. At the time, public pressure to rally around Bush and suppress any questions about his legitimacy was so intense that the mere decision to publish the findings at all provoked controversy.

Read more: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/09/9-11-made-the-media-whitewash-bush-vs-gore.html

[montanacowboy]

1. Not news to some of us

who already were aware
The only real stolen election was Bush v Gore
Remember Beer Boy leading the Brooks Bros riot

And two days after 9/11 Bush told Tony Blair we were going after Iraq

[unblock]

2. As a matter of trivia, shrub had other ways of stealing the election

Yes, gore won Florida and the electoral college had the votes been counted legitimately. But the Republican Party was never going to allow that

Had the Supreme Court not intervened, republicans controlled the Florida legislature. They could have intervened and certified the state for shrub after declaring the election invalid of rife with (made up) fraud.

Alternatively, they could have simply refused to certify the election at all, or created confusion by sending two sets of electors, as has been done in 1876. This would have thrown the presidential election into the House of Representatives, which republicans controlled, and again they would have given it to shrub.

Especially given what we know today, it's easy to see republicans as willing to cheat to win. Of course, this has been true at least as far back as Nixon.