The just can’t help themselves. In “Revisiting Florida 2000 and the Butterfly Effect,” New York Times reporter reminds readers (or as I would prefer to ssay, “whines”) that “the evidence is strong that Al Gore would have won had it not been for an infamous ballot design in Palm Beach County.” The Times will not, when Jimmy Carter dies, reminisce that “the evidence is strong” that if Jimmy Carter had not used the single Presidential debate against Ronald Reagan to appeal to the authority of his then 13-year old daughter Amy regarding nuclear proliferation, Carter would have been elected to a second term,” but then that wouldn’t have given the hypocritical paper an opportunity to claim, falsely and with complete knowledge that the claim was false, that Reagan’s history-altering election wasn’t legitimate. Nate Cohn, one of the rising leftist propagandists in the Times stable of dishonest pundits, does pivot to that claim regarding George W. Bush’s election.

Unlike Trump lawyers like John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, however, Cohn won’t be disbarred for publicly making a false assertion. He’s not a lawyer, of course, so he can’t be disbarred, but it’s ironic: lawyers represent their clients’ interests and points of view, and are usually not punished for zealous representation of theories the lawyers themselves might not even believe as they advance of those interests. Journalists, unlike lawyers, are not supposed to be advocates: they are obligated to communicate the truth. Yet lying journalists are seldom “de-journed” or whatever you’d call it. How ironic.

But I digress. Cohn relates, for those too young or too civically ignorant to recall, that “Gore would have won Florida, and therefore the presidency, if it weren’t for the infamous ‘butterfly ballot’ in Palm Beach County.” The Gore-Lieberman ticket came less than 600 Florida votes away from winning the White House, Cohn relates, as he takes us down memory lane…

…the butterfly ballot was very unusual. Candidates were listed on both sides of the ballot, and voters cast a ballot by punching a corresponding hole in the middle. What made it so unusual was that the ordering of the candidates on the ballot didn’t have the same logic as the corresponding punch hole: George W. Bush and Mr. Gore were the first two candidates listed on the left-hand side, but they corresponded to the first and third hole on the punch. The second punch corresponded with the first candidate on the right-hand side of the ballot: the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan, running as a Reform Party candidate. After the election, many voters from Palm Beach claimed they had inadvertently voted for Mr. Buchanan when they meant to vote for Mr. Gore. This is clear in the data. Mr. Buchanan fared far better in Palm Beach County than he did on the other side of the county line. Indeed, Mr. Buchanan fared far better in Palm Beach County than any politically or demographically comparable area in the country….As far as the data goes, the case is a slam dunk: At least 2,000 voters who meant to vote for Gore-Lieberman ended up voting for Mr. Buchanan. That would have easily been enough to decide the election.

Awww. Too bad! At least 2000 Democrats were too lazy, irresponsible, or dim-witted to cast a vote for the candidate they preferred. These boobs carelessly neglected to check over their ballots (as the instructions always urge voters to do) and botched the simple act of casting a vote, which any adult worthy of the franchise should be able to avoid. I believed then and believe now that the simple remedy to that problem was for the Democratic Party to stop trying to appeal to idiots, something they are still doing, but even more vociferously.

I’m sorry, I digressed again! My ultimate point is that Cohn writes this: “We’ll never know what would have happened if the Supreme Court had allowed the recount continue” for months, as it showed every indication of doing.

There’s the Big Lie: that the Supreme Court, by halting a thoroughly messed-up vote-counting process highlighted by the Florida Supreme Court changing the law on ballot counting to keep Gore’s hopes alive, “gave” the Presidency to Bush by giving Florida’s electoral votes to the Republican based on that 600 vote margin.

The New York Times was part of an alliance of newspapers that arranged, after the election, to sponsor a meticulous hand count of the disputed Florida ballots, then reduced to “undervotes,” “overvotes,” and “hanging chads.” The papers did this because they were certain—bias makes you stupid—that such a recount, what SCOTUS effectively prevented, would show that Bush’s presidency was illegitimate and that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority had “stolen” the election. Then it would be glorious! Bush’s Presidency would be crippled. The news media would have new ammunition to claim that the Supreme Court was just another partisan tool of the Right.

In other words, they would be able to do to Bush’s Presidency what these same news organizations later did to Trump’s Presidency.

Except, as Cohn is either aware or should be, we do know what would have happened if the Supreme Court had allowed the recount to continue (if we don’t consider the likely Constitutional crisis that a long delay probably would have caused, with there being no final result and the fate of the election being thrown into the House of Representatives,where the Republican majority would have elected Bush as President, and the Senate, where the Democratic majority there would have elected Joe Lieberman VP.) We know because the New York Times was among the myriad news sources that reported this, as NPR did at the time:

Media Recount: Bush Won the 2000 Election

Nation Apr 3

In the first full study of Florida’s ballots since the election ended, The Miami Herald and USA Today reported George W. Bush would have widened his 537-vote victory to a 1,665-vote margin if the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have been allowed to continue, using standards that would have allowed even faintly dimpled “undervotes” — ballots the voter has noticeably indented but had not punched all the way through — to be counted.

The study, conducted by the accounting firm of BDO Seidman, counted over 60,000 votes in Florida’s 67 counties, tabulating separate vote totals in several standards categories….In their reports, the newspapers assumed counts already completed when the court-ordered recount was stopped would have been included in any official count. Thus, they allowed numbers from seven counties — Palm Beach, Volusia, Broward, Hamilton, Manatee, Escambia and Madison — to stand, but applied the most inclusive standards to votes in the rest of the state.

… Bush would have retained his lead.

Never mind facts: the now thoroughly partisan and dishonest journalistic establishment routinely writes, including Times pundits and reporters, that “the Supreme Court gave the Presidency to Bush” or variations on that insidious characterization.

That is true misinformation, and undeniably so: when a news source or prominent individual distorts history and the fact to the contrary have been recorded and are not in dispute. That kind of misinformation, however, when weaponized for the benefit of those who stand for all that’s right and good, isn’t the kind that progressives and Democrats want censored or even punished. Dangerous misinformation is whatever weakens narratives that serve the interests and aspirations of the far Left.