9/11 made the media whitewash what really happened in Bush v. Gore
By now nearly everybody, with the exception of a handful of Bush administration leftovers, understands that the September 11 attacks induced some form of mass psychosis into the American polity. The contours of this understanding vary. Nearly everybody now agrees that the post-9/11 impulse to divide the world into a Manichaean contest between Islamic terrorism and democracy was tragically misguided. A smaller group of Americans understands that the rally-around-the-flag atmosphere canonized and empowered a series of deeply unworthy figures, ranging from Rudy Giuliani to Dick Cheney to George W. Bush, on the basis of their ability to act out some ideal of masculinity.
Yet there remains one important post-9/11 belief that has yet to undergo significant revision: the comforting fallacy that George W. Bush won the 2000 election more or less fairly.
Bush won the election because five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices overruled the Florida State Supreme Court and blocked a statewide ballot recount. A consortium of newspapers undertook its own recount. By an unfortunate accident of timing, those results came out in November 2001, when post-attack hysteria was at an apogee. A broad bipartisan consensus held that the paramount national imperative was to unify behind a president protecting the country from existential and ongoing threats. At the time, public pressure to rally around Bush and suppress any questions about his legitimacy was so intense that the mere decision to publish the findings at all provoked controversy.
Newspapers generally handled this pressure by presenting their results in the most delicate, Bush-friendly way. The Washington Post headlined its story, “Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush.” The New York Times report was headlined, “EXAMINING THE VOTE: THE OVERVIEW; Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote.”
These summaries were at best oversimplistic, and at worst outright false. But they registered in the public consciousness so deeply that most people believe those conclusions to this day. [Continue reading…]