Of course not. They know . Republicans meanwhile are apoplectic at these bouts of mind reading, at the moving deadlines which somehow aren't deadlines, at the elusive non-standards, at the dimples that do, or don't, count. It turns out that our two parties are deeply divided about first principles, oddly enough. Al Gore and George W. Bush have ended up fighting to vindicate the deepest beliefs of their respective parties.
Republicans believe in the rules.
This critical difference runs wide and deep. And it pops up in all sorts of issues that divide the two parties. The Democrats are the party of the dimpled chad, from which one tries to intuit an unknown voter's intention. And they are also the party that has given us the theory of hate crimes, in which prosecutions turn not on the usual rules of evidence but on what the criminal meant by his crime. In the hate-crime context, one is punished not just for what one does, but for what one is thinking while doing it.