Then, after all the news organizations have finished their own counts and we see more clearly from President Bush's presidency how high the stakes were, a real historian will come along and tell us what it all meant. In the meantime, we have Jake Tapper, who covers politics for Salon, emptying his notebook in book form, so anxious to be the first out of the gate that he harms his otherwise good reputation in the process. Books are not supposed to be rough draft Internet dispatches thrown between hard covers. The impressionistic present tense sounds cyberhip and immediate, but it's sometimes bogus. And Bush honcho Ed Gillespie is seen on the ground Monday and Tuesday, steering the orchestrated ugliness.
Tapper never says.
As for Stevens, he told me recently he did his swingin' up in Vermont and never set foot in Florida during the entire post-election period. The circumstantial evidence that something sleazy happened here is convincing. More than 14,000 overseas military ballots arrived legitimately by Election Day. Because of the ferocious and highly successful GOP efforts to label the Gore campaign as anti-military for even thinking of a challenge to military absentee ballots, the postmarks on those dribbling in afterwards were not considered. But despite huge publicity about the disputed outcome, only 446 additional such military ballots arrived in the first six days after the election.