Not those bozos again!

As I channel surfed past MSNBC tonight, I was captivated by yet another Donkster debate - The "Brown and Black Presidential Forum" in fact.

No, I didn't want to hear the panderers expostulate about "reparations" or even watch Rev. Al beat up Howie. What was captivating was the hostess - Maria Celeste Arraras. I'm only kidding a little - Maria was truly the only bright spot in a really dismal show put on by the usual suspects. Even the usually level headed Joe Lieberman emitted a whine that in Florida in 2000, thousands of Haitians, African Americans, elderly Americans were denied the chance to vote.

Since the leftoids are in love with this one, let's take a cruise down that particular sewer with John Berlau in Insight Magazine who castigates the GOP establishment for letting this canard slide.

... the GOP cannot simply let Democratic claims about the Florida recount go unchallenged. "I've had discussions with a number of friends and they say they're tired of repeating the same thing over and over," Peter Kirsanow, a Cleveland lawyer and Republican member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), tells Insight. "But that's what liberals do and that's why they're successful. They spread these myths until they're accepted as truth. Any sort of falsehood that drives people to vote one way needs to be corrected." Kirsanow adds that the myths must be corrected because "unchallenged claims that the process was corrupted or tainted erodes the legitimacy of democratic government."
...
After hand counts conducted by the media showed that Bush still would have won under any fair standard, Democratic activists have focused on specific charges of disenfranchising black voters. The USCCR - which at the time was led by highly partisan Democrat Mary Frances Berry and had only one Republican commissioner - issued a scathing majority report in 2001 claiming "widespread voter disenfranchisement" and accusing Harris and Jeb Bush of "failing to fulfill their duties in a manner that would prevent this disenfranchisement."

One of the charges made in the commission's report, and recently leveled on C-SPAN by a liberal caller, is the so-called "voter purge." This was a database of the names of felons set up for the state by a private company that contained some errors. In a question to Harris, the CPI asked in an accusatory tone, "The purging of thousands of votes occurred on your clock ... why haven't you come out to apologize to the folks, a great majority of them black voters in your home state?" As Harris patiently explained, the list wasn't her idea. A mandate for the list was passed into law in 1998, sponsored by two Democratic legislators and signed by Democratic governor Lawton Chiles, Jeb Bush's predecessor. The law was passed in response to the 1997 Miami mayoral election that was overturned by a court due to widespread fraud, with votes from disqualified felons and dead people. And Harris had no power to remove voters from the rolls. In Florida's decentralized election system, that's reserved for elected county supervisors of elections. The list served as a tool for them to use and verify with their own records.

Both the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post - "hardly bastions of Republicanism" as Harris has pointed out - found that, if anything, county officials were too permissive in whom they let vote, and this largely was to the benefit of Al Gore. An analysis by the Post found that 5,600 people whose names matched the names of convicted felons who should have been disqualified were allowed to cast their ballots. "These illegal voters almost certainly influenced the down-to-the-wire presidential election," the Post reported. "It's likely they benefited Democratic candidate Al Gore: Of the likely felons identified by the Post, 68 percent were registered Democrats."
...
Kirsanow adds that other charges from Democratic activists turned out to be "falsehoods and exaggerations." For instance, when the commission investigated the charge that a police traffic checkpoint near a polling place intimidated black voters, it turned out that the checkpoint operated for 90 minutes at a location two miles from the poll and not even on the same road. Sixteen people were given citations - 12 of whom were white.

There's much more by following the link, but you get the idea. And if you want to talk about disenfranchisement, how about the members of the armed services who were illegally denied the right to vote by Al Gore's buttboys?

Which reminds me, noxious Mary Frances Berry has endorsed Weasley. She is still claiming on the USCCR web site that she is an "independent", which is how she used to get around the restriction that no more than 4 members of the commisssion are to be from one party. Sounds like the GOP needs to name some "independents" to the commission themselves.