lynx-
George Bush Sr, former CIA director and former US President, has two sons: George and Jeb.
George was governor of Texas, and ran for president when Jeb was Governor of Florida.
During the 2000 presidential election in question, there was a major scandal where voting machines in Florida were found to register votes for democratic candidate Al Gore as if they had been cast for a 3rd party candidate who had zero chance of winning the presidency. How did that happen? No one knows, but the generous interpretation (I.e., total lie) is that they weren’t set up properly: the electoral ballot had 1) Bush, 2) Gore, 3) Buchanan, but the machines were set up so that button 2) punched a vote for Buchanan, and button 3) punched a hole for Gore. No other state had issues like these, so it’s a significant (non)coincidence that it happened in Florida.
Thousands of people complained that their votes were miscast by the machine. The controversy reached the Supreme Court, who effectively decided that Bush was the winner of the election.
The NYT report now says in pretty clear terms what people have been saying since the year 2000: the votes that were miscast for Buchanan would have been enough for Gore, an ecologist and not particularly war hungry man, to win the presidency. Instead we got Bush, a man with vested interests in oil and gas companies, whose father directed the CIA during the Iran Contra drugs and guns scandal and as POTUS supported proto-Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, who had personal beef with Sadam Hussain, and who’s grandfather helped prop up wahabist Ibn Saud in the creation of Saudi Arabia.
24 years later, too late to change anything, the intelligentsia are publicly acknowledging that the US election was mistaken (in any other country it would’ve been called ‘stolen’ or a fraud).
What would our world look like had Bush and his oil-hungry, war-mongering, disinfo-spreading ilk not won the election?
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Leshaches
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/30/upshot/florida-2000-gore-ballot.html
In a report that shocks no one, it seems that Al Gore would have won the 2000 US election and defeated Bush, if not for the very bizarre incident with illogical voting machines in the state where Bush’s brother was governor at the time.
In a nutshell:
Ballot reads-
George Bush
Al Gore
Pat Buchanan
Button 1 on the voting machine punches a hole over George Bush.
Button 2 on the machine punches a hole over Buchanan.
Button 3 punches a hole over Al Gore.
Stupid or diabolical, it gave Bush the razor-thin margin needed to clinch the presidency, with the help of a friendly Supreme Court who refused to allow a correction/local recount.
What a different world this could have been if only those machines weren’t messed up like that.