Despite all their lecturing and posturing about how alleged election denialism is bad for American democracy or whatever, the Democratic Party and their media allies are chock full of certifiable election deniers when it comes to many previous elections in modern history, including the 2016 presidential election and the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election.
Deniers Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams, the two losers respectively in those contests, have been treated with the utmost reverence by the exact same people who would like the book thrown at any Republican who disputes the outcome of elections where their opponents were declared the victors, including of course former President Donald Trump.
READ: Hillary Clinton Committed an Assault on Democracy Last Night With Stacey Abrams and We Need Answers
But there is perhaps no greater example of Democrat/media election denialism hypocrisy than there is in the case of the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe put a face to it by letting the cat slip out of the bag during his failed campaign 2021 campaign, repeatedly refusing to admit Bush legitimately won the 2000 election during a media interview.
Here we are in March 2024, over 23 years beyond the November 2020 election, and now it’s the New York Times going full election truther, doing so in the obituary for former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), who was Gore’s vice presidential pick in 2000.
Here’s what they wrote in the opening paragraph:
Joseph I. Lieberman, Connecticut’s four-term United States senator and Vice President Al Gore’s Democratic running mate in the 2000 presidential election, which was won by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney when the Supreme Court halted a Florida ballot recount, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 82.
[…]
After weeks of dispute, it came down to the results in Florida, where fewer than 600 votes appeared to separate the opposing candidates. In an unsigned landmark decision on Dec. 12, the United States Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, that different standards of recounting in different counties had violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution and ordered an end to the recounts. The decision effectively awarded Florida’s 25 electoral votes, and the presidency, to Mr. Bush.
Unhinged @nytimes still hasn’t accepted the results of the 2000 election pic.twitter.com/TA7Ijte0Gp
— Brent Scher (@BrentScher) March 27, 2024
Incredibly, the Times interviewed Lieberman in 2023 to pre-write his obituary (something often done in the media), and they made sure to ask him about that election so they could rehash the issue and include his commentary on it in the obituary.
Needless to say, the Times was mocked and taken to school in response, with one Twitter user providing a helpful translation for what they were saying:
“We’re not denying the 2000 election, we’re just saying we’ll never know who won because we never got a recount that favored Gore.”
Townhall.com political editor Guy Benson also weighed in:
The news media conducted a full statewide recount after the fact — not just the cherry-picked counties Gore wanted tallied again. Bush’s Florida victory margin *increased* by more than 1,000 votes. Bush won. https://t.co/YvgKeispcy
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) March 28, 2024
Not only were there already multiple recounts done at the time of the election, but afterward, multiple news outlets including the NY Times had analyses done and concluded that Bush likely still would have won even without the Supreme Court ruling:
A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year’s presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward.
Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have charged, the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore. A close examination of the ballots found that Mr. Bush would have retained a slender margin over Mr. Gore if the Florida court’s order to recount more than 43,000 ballots had not been reversed by the United States Supreme Court.
Even under the strategy that Mr. Gore pursued at the beginning of the Florida standoff — filing suit to force hand recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties — Mr. Bush would have kept his lead, according to the ballot review conducted for a consortium of news organizations.
Looks like someone at the Times has fallen down on the job in making sure their reporters have read back over their prior stories on the 2000 election results.
All of that said, if there’s one thing most people can agree on in the aftermath of the Times obituary on Lieberman is the strong likelihood that they’ve done themselves no favors with NBC News.
For instance, attorney Ilya Shapiro quipped: “Guess since NYT are election deniers, nobody there can be hired by NBC.”
Heh.
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