"We now know that he (Al Gore) would have won Florida," proclaimed Ronald Prescott Reagan, son of the late President Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Ron made this incredible declaration during MSNBC"s Chris Matthews' show, as they reported about former Vice President Al Gore's speech at the Democratic National Convention. When asked by Matthews how does he know this, Ron remarked that there was a "consortium" of newspapers who counted the votes in Florida and determined that Gore would have won. Matthews incredibly confirmed this by saying Gore would have won the election if he requested a statewide vote recount in Florida.
If this is the quality of reporting by MSNBC, is it any wonder they have very little audience. It is well known that their CEO is a Clintonista and that Ron Reagan was asked to address the Democratic convention after he made his veiled reference criticizing the Bush administration during his father's funeral (which indicates the opportunistic character of Ron). However, this set new standards for propaganda. Was it Goebbels who said if you tell a lie a thousand times people will believe it? Ron must have read his book (of course then again that could be said about most Democrats).
Memo to Reagan and Matthews from CNN (not exactly a part of the right wing conspiracy) April 4, 2001:
- "If a recount of Florida's disputed votes in last year's close presidential election had been allowed to proceed by the U.S. Supreme Court, Republican George W. Bush still would have won the White House, two newspapers reported Wednesday.
"The Miami Herald and USA Today conducted a comprehensive review of 64,248 'undercounted' ballots in Florida's 67 counties that ended last month.
"Their count showed that Bush's razor-thin margin of 537 votes - certified in December by the Florida's Secretary of State's office - would have tripled to 1,665 votes if counted according to standards advocated by his Democratic rival, former Vice President Al Gore. ...'In the end, I think we probably confirmed that President Bush should have been president of the United States,' said Mark Seibel, the paper's managing editor. 'I think that it was worthwhile because so many people had questions about how the ballots had been handled and how the process had worked.' "
However, the World Socialist Web Site did say that the USA Today and Miami Herald results were not correct. Perhaps this is the paper Ron Reagan reads. They wanted the results of a Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post study, which they felt would be more comprehensive.
When those results were published by CNN it too confirmed the previous study:
- "A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.
"The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies, including CNN....NORC dispatched an army of trained investigators to examine closely every rejected ballot in all 67 Florida counties, including handwritten and punch-card ballots. The NORC team of coders were able to examine about 99 percent of them, but county officials were unable to deliver as many as 2,200 problem ballots to NORC investigators. In addition, the uncertainties of human judgment, combined with some counties' inability to produce the same undervotes and overvotes that they saw last year, create a margin of error that makes the study instructive but not definitive in its findings. ...The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago study was commissioned by eight media companies - The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, the St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post, The Washington Post and the Tribune Co., which includes the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel and Baltimore Sun, as well as other papers."
Apparently the World Socialist Web Site, Ronald Prescott Reagan, and Chris Matthews all drink the same Kool Aid, either that or they are receiving their marching orders from Terry McAuliffe.
