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Getting Snippy!

The Clarion Call
Commentary by Corrin Strong
Clarion Publisher

11/16/2000 Clarion News Service.

Al Gore was right about one thing. Republicans are getting a little snippy lately. That tends to happen when you try to steal a presidential election from us. I'll admit it. I personally have been extremely snippy for the last week, especially at the national news media.
It was bad enough that they made at least three bad projections on election night (New Mexico once and Florida twice), but their conduct ever since has been even more disgraceful. Here are a few of my pet peeves:
First, calling Al Gore the popular vote victor as often as possible. This may ultimately turn out to be as accurate as some of their other projections. As of Tuesday, Gore had a less than 200,000 vote lead out of over 100 million counted. That's about 48.9% to 48.7% and there were still about a million absentee ballots uncounted in California alone! If the networks were truly honest about this they would put that contest in the 'too close to call' category as well.
But secondly, who cares? That's not the game we're playing! It's like looking at a baseball box score and awarding the victory to the team with the most hits. It's nice to have a lot of hits, but it's better to score runs!
This is just one example of the network talking head's seeming total inability to recognize Democratic spin when they are being hand-fed it. Are they really that stupid or is something else going on here? A look at the electoral map shows that Gore dominated in the big cities and especially on the two coasts with the major media centers. Bush, on the contrary, won big in Middle America, known to liberal sophisticates as 'flyover country.'
Frequent surveys have shown that, as a group, national media types are among the most solidly Democratic voting blocks in the country. Almost 90 per cent of them voted for Clinton, and probably an equal percentage went for Gore. Isn't it only natural to assume that, being human, they sometimes let their personal preferences color their objectivity?

This is particularly true of the many cable news hosts and commentators who are nothing more than thinly disguised cheerleaders and political spinmeisters for mainly the Democrat side. A steady diet of their lies, half-truths and distortions would give anybody indigestion!
Now, I am not saying that all Democrats are liars and thieves. I certainly don't believe that, but it is clear that Al Gore and the people at the highest levels of his campaign are willing to say and do anything in order to win this contest­ and that they have no regard for the damage that conduct is causing the country and our position in the world.
I suspect that the ultimate strategy here is like a game of chicken similar to what we see from terrorists. “Give me what I want or I will hurt innocent people.” They are counting on the opposition's love of country to prevent them from playing out this vicious game of brinksmanship to the end.
Listen here Mr. Gore. When you start playing fast and loose with the future of our country, that makes a lot of us damn snippy!

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