Have you no decency, Al?

Dear Al,

When you were caught making phone calls from the White House to raise
Democratic National Committee money, you were committing a federal
crime. No federal employee can make political fund-raising calls from a
federal building. You broke the law, Al, but you didn't care. You didn't
plead guilty. You didn't resign.

Instead, you claimed that there was "no controlling legal authority"
that said what you had done was a crime. You were dead wrong, Al. The
law was clear. In fact, a deputy attorney general during the Jimmy
Carter era had issued an opinion saying that what you did violated the
law. But since Janet Reno refused to take you on, you got away with a
crime.

For the past five weeks, you have tried to use lawyers to change the
outcome of the Florida vote and give you the presidency. First you
demanded a machine recount. You got it and still lost. Then you
convinced the Florida Supreme Court to change the rules and order a
selective hand recount.

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They did, but when the deadline for submitting the hand recount
passed, you still lost. At first you praised the election officials in
Miami-Dade County for doing a machine recount, but when they refused to
do a hand recount, you attacked them. Time and again, Al, you made it
clear that the only thing you cared about was creating new Al Gore
votes.

You cloaked your raw lust for power with the words, "I want every
vote to be counted." Now that it is clear that you will get no more
votes from recounts, you have declared war on all Floridians who didn't
vote for you.

Tens of thousands of military servicemen and women and regular
Floridians applied for, filled out and sent back absentee ballots. All
they wanted to do is to participate in our democracy as voters. Some of
their applications had errors. In those case, party workers corrected
the errors on those applications.

What the party workers did was wrong. But it wasn't a crime. They
didn't touch the ballots. They didn't change the ballots. They didn't
mark the ballots. They just corrected errors on the applications.

There is no question that these were legitimate ballots. There is no
question of the intent of these voters. But because they didn't vote for
you, you want to silence their voice. Because they made a minor mistake
on an application, and good Americans corrected that clerical mistake,
you want to deny them their right to be heard.

You are so desperate that you even want to disenfranchise some of the
people who voted for you. Why? Because you are convinced that if you can
get all of the "questioned" absentee ballots thrown out, you will knock
out more Bush votes than Gore votes.

Have you no decency, Al Gore? Do you really want to sacrifice the
votes of decent Americans if that is what it takes for you to win? Have
you made your Faustian deal already?

Al, if you deserved the benefit of the doubt for breaking federal
laws, Floridian voters deserve the benefit of the doubt for making a
clerical error. So long as there is no question about the validity of
their identity and no evidence that their ballot was tampered with,
their vote should count.

Act like you love America more than your reflection in the mirror.

Stop your war on absentee voters.

Show the world that, at the end of your political career, you are in
fact a decent man.