Thread by @Doc_0

Al Gore conceded on Dec 13, 2000. The media treated him as a hero, a great statesman doing one last service for the country he loved so much by gracefully accepting that his challenges would not succeed.

Golly gee, I wonder if they'd give Trump the same coverage on Dec 13 2020.

You young'uns who weren't around for 2000 are probably getting a hilariously cooked and slanted media perspective on what actually happened. Gore, his lawyers, his party, and DNC Media fought bitterly to steal Florida. It was scorched earth.

The media was doing emergency crisis news shows, interviewing people who tearfully swore they meant to vote for Gore, pinky swear, but their poor little heads were twisted all around by those confusing (Democrat-designed) ballots. They were treated like martyrs by the media.

For months after Bush was sworn in - I think it was actually YEARS afterward - the media kept requesting ballots and frantically trying to recount them under rules that would manufacture a Gore "victory", so they could tarnish the legitimacy of Bush's election.

These efforts were never successful, even under fabricated rules more generous to Gore than anything that could ever have been used in real life. They still kept writing stories about how Gore might have been the "real winner" if not for accursed conservative judges.

Democrats and the media were absolutely savage to everyone involved in the process seen as "against Gore." Try Googling the name "Katherine Harris," kids - and prepare to be triggered by rampant misogyny!

A cottage industry of left-wing campfire ghost stories about Bush stealing Florida with all kinds of improbable schemes emerged. Some of those bleak fairy tales are repeated and believed to this very day. The Dem political/media apparatus NEVER fully accepted Bush as president.

They constantly insisted he was sort of half-a-president, with no "mandate" to govern because his election wasn't really legitimate. Bush Republicans swallowed far too much of that swamp water and worked out "power sharing" arrangements that were invariably twisted to screw them.

So spare me the hysterical shrieking about Trump supposedly threatening the safety of the republic by taking time to work through legal processes that have VASTLY more credible evidence to justify his challenges than Al Gore ever did.

Gore's people were actually staring at paper ballots and trying to magically divine who they "really voted for" if the president vote wasn't punched out, or was punched out incompletely, or even if it was punched for someone else after the voter favored Dems down-ballot.

I'm glad to say Florida learned some hard lessons from that debacle and tightened its procedures greatly over the ensuing 20 years. I only wish every other state had followed suit. We should INSIST they do now, after THIS. /end