"You cannot trust the legal process"

I'm an old dude now so this stuff is practically yesterday for me. But maybe not everybody remembers the ancient wayback past of practically yesterday. So, from time to time, it's useful to point out that, hey this shit happening right now actually happened before in the (very slight) hope that maybe it can be different this time.

In McAlevey’s book, she recounts that in her first days in West Palm Beach she worked on collecting affidavits from Floridians, mostly retirees, who believed their votes had not been correctly tallied. There were huge numbers of them, and they were furious. McAlevey asked her superiors,“So when can we actually mobilize them, put these wonderful angry senior citizens into the streets and on camera?”

The answer came back: never. She then learned that Jesse Jackson was coming to Florida to lead a rally, but organized labor would not be participating. Why? Because the Gore campaign wanted everyone to stand down. McAlevey quotes a higher up as telling her, “The Gore campaign has made the decision that this is not the image they want. They don’t want to protest. They don’t want to rock the boat. They don’t want to seem like they don’t have faith in the legal system.”

This was Gore’s central mistake. “You cannot trust ‘the legal process,’” McAlevey explains today. In reality, there is no such thing as a fair legal process separate from and immune to outside political pressure.

But pointing this out and hoping for better also sets us up to ask, is our Democrats learning?  And the answer to that question might cause us old dudes to develop ulcers.