Feedback: Whole quote tells whole story

Ann Adams needs to start actually reading the books and magazines that she quotes (Letters, Jan. 3).

As usual there were parts left out of this quote from Jeffrey Toobin’s book, “Too Close to Call.” Her quote came from page 201. Here is the complete quote. “Even accepting that Ron is right and there is a theoretical way that I could win by 9 votes, I couldn’t be president of the United States that way, It’s not right,” he said “If we knock out thousands of votes of military people, I couldn’t govern. I could win, but I couldn’t govern. Gore opted to ask for more counting.”

He didn’t give up trying. Had she read the book she would know that his advisors told him at the start that he couldn’t legally win. It was acknowledged that the military votes were assumed to be for Bush. Gore lost all 5 court decisions trying to throw out the absentee votes in various counties and the state supreme court (11/27 to 12/12 Florida election time line).

She neglected to mention quotes like: “Gore won the national popular vote, this was not widely know on Wednesday morning and the Gore staff felt it important to drive this point home at every opportunity. The popular vote had no legal significance but it provided a sort of political imprimatur to keep the fight going.”

Gore wanted to incite the people into thinking that he was robbed even though they knew he wasn’t. This gave him time to send people to every county in Florida covertly to try to dig up dirt.

She also neglected to mention that Joe Lieberman had already gone on Meet the Press on Nov.18 stating that he would “never authorize nor tolerate a campaign that was aimed specifically at invalidating absentee ballots of members of the military.”

She also neglected to mention that the pre-existing Florida Administrative Code said that ballots could be accepted if they were “postmarked or signed and dated no later than the date of the election.” Or that in the year 2000 Florida was doing a test of e-votes with the deployed military for that election. Tests have bugs. That is why they do tests on small controlled groups instead of installing new methods for the whole country at once. Nobody but the courts could over turn these vote but there was no legal way to do that.

Yes, you’re right. This book does indeed show the true character of Al Gore. There were other states he could have questioned but they didn’t have a governor named Bush.

Funny how old history keeps popping up just in time to help with the endorsement that Gore gave to Howard Dean. Did it stir up those old feelings and make you mad all over again and make you want revenge? Good, that is why they sent you that inaccurate quote. They didn’t count on you putting it in the paper and having someone actually read the book. Yes, honesty and character, they are important or at least that’s this month’s line.

Smoke and mirrors take you eyes off the fact that 2000 is long over and this is a totally separate election. Let’s get on with life. What can your candidate do better to protect America? That’s what I want to here. Promises, not finger pointing and old history.

Sharyn Mellors

Coupeville

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