Three Items Of Significance

1.  Barack Obama rightly called Bill Clinton “the Explainer in Chief”; but what he explains here is every bit as clear and important.  Three minutes.

2. Gore won Florida, and thus the Presidency, by more than 40,000 votes if you count for Bush the 35,000 who punched his chad but also wrote his name — the voter’s attempt to be doubly certain his or her vote was cast for Bush — and the 80,000 where the same was done for Gore.

There were likely other reasons Gore won Florida, but that one was dispositive — or would have been, had Florida’s Secretary of State not been appointed by Bush’s brother and not been simultaneously in charge of the election and co-chair of the Bush campaign.  She threw out those “overvotes” because “the intent of the voter could not be discerned.”

(In Texas, where Bush was governor at the time, all such votes were ruled valid, as common sense suggests they should be.)

Fairly counted, Gore won both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

There’s nothing to be done about that now except to turn out a massive blue wave in November.*

Yet it is worth noting that had Gore been inaugurated, there would have been no war in Iraq (indeed, very possibly no 9/11 in the first place), no right-wing Supreme Court (and thus no gutting of the Voting Rights Act or President Donald Trump) . . . women’s reproductive rights would still be protected by Roe . . . we’d be eight years further along combatting climate change . . . the assault weapons ban might not have been allowed to expire . . . and on and on.

3. So did Hitler.  “And now we know how he did it,” says Thom Hartmann in this 12-minute video . . .

. . . which follows all too persuasively the Robert Kagan piece offered Friday: A Trump Dictatorship Is Increasingly Inevitable.*

If you think Hartmann is unfair or goes too far in a few places, I would agree with you; but in the main he is spot on — and he doesn’t even mention the book of Hitler’s speeches Ivana Trump said he kept by his bedside.  When asked about this in 1990 by Vanity Fair‘s Marie Brenner, he told her it was not a book of Hitler’s speeches, it was Mein Kampf.  (Oh, swell.) But in fact it was My New Order, a book of Hitler’s speeches.

Have a great week.

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