The world will little note, nor long remember, this petty crime.
          It was accomplished in a small county under cover of darkness—or at least
          beneath the cloak of confusion that the clash over votes in the larger counties afforded.

          You might have overlooked it; references to it were buried in the
          midst of a long piece on a jump page in the Saturday, Nov. 25 New York Times. It
          involved a decision by the election board of Nassau County, “a Republican enclave
          in Florida’s northeast corner.” With no legal notice, the Republican election board
          head threw out the results of the legally mandated machine re-count. There were no
          hand-count or hanging-chad issues here; this was the automatic re-count every
          Florida county was required to perform the day after the election because of the
          closeness of the vote.

          The legally mandated re-count had slightly increased Al Gore’s totals. The county
          board’s decision to discard the re-count and certify the original count, The Times
          reported, “cost Mr. Gore 52 votes.” Not much, but enough—if included with other
          re-count totals in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade that were also excluded—to give
          Mr. Gore a nine-vote lead, his lawyers claimed.

          And why this sudden last-minute decision to ignore the re-count total?
          “Ms.Shirley King [GOP election-board head] acted on advice from Katherine Harris,
          the secretary of state who was also co-chairwoman of the Bush campaign in Florida ....
          Ms. Harris advised Ms. King she could certify either count....”

          Hey, why not? Nobody’s looking. You go, girl! It’s just a few votes. If it feels
          good, do it. Does anyone doubt that if the county board had wanted to add votes
          for Al Gore, Ms. Harris would have laughed at a last- minute switch?

          Well, at the last minute, some Democrat in the sleepy burg woke up and protested
          this little emblematic act of pure theft, and it’s likely to be included in the lawsuit
          contesting the Florida election along with Miami-Dade County’s aborted recount.
          But the Gore challenge is likely to fail or run out of time, and it doesn’t seem likely
          that those votes will ever be restored or the theft punished.

          The late Lars-Erik Nelson characterized the post-election tactics used by Ms. Harris
          and the Bush campaign in Florida as “a mugging.” When you consider the massive
          pre-election fraud in Seminole County—in which Republican registrars altered
          thousands of absentee-ballot applications in order to qualify G.O.P. voters and
          disqualify Democrats—you could call it a Republican wilding. If you want to know
          the truth, I blame the Bush campaign for the death of Nelson, one of the best
          journalists in America, someone who deserves a posthumous Pulitzer not just for
          his powerful, skeptical reporting on the Wen Ho Lee case, but for his consistently
          brilliant and iconoclastic commentary over the course of a career.

          Nelson saw what was going on in Florida early on, and he didn’t see it with any
          equanimity: One of his colleagues at the Daily News called him on the day of his
          death, the afternoon of the televised Florida Supreme Court argument, and recalled
          Nelson crying out, “I can’t believe they said that!” over some outrageous assertion
          by the lawyers for Ms. Harris and Mr. Bush.

          A few hours later, he was found in front of his television set, dead of a stroke. No
          one will convince me it was unrelated. I know the experience of watching
          developments in Florida—and I would venture to guess that no one in America has
          devoted (or wasted) more hours to nonstop “all re-count all the time” TV than I
          have—has frequently driven my blood pressure to dangerous, if not yet stroke-like,
          levels.

          Yes, I’ve become a partisan—not out of any admiration for that patronizing robot
          Al Gore, but because of the infuriating arrogance and self-righteousness of the
          Bush-Baker-Harris operation. Their smarmy piety about “the rule of law” until the
          law rules against them. Their willingness to use the Big Lie (“I have exercised due
          discretion”; “The votes have been counted and re-counted and re-counted again,”
          when in fact the issue in dispute are the tens of thousands of votes that
          demonstrably inadequate machines failed to register). And, as the Nassau County
          episode demonstrates, their willingness to countenance outright theft.

          But again, it probably won’t matter, the Nassau County theft. The decks are
          stacked against a Gore lawsuit to contest the election. The Democratic Party
          mediocrities who don the spurious mantle of “statesmen” will come out of the
          woodwork this week to urge “closure” on Mr. Gore and Mr. Boies. Senator Bob
          (“Profile in Courage”) Torricelli was the first out of the box and into the tank.
          They’ll all be eager to get the approbation of the edit-page pundits, who are ever
          ready to stand up for national niceness and bring-us-together platitudes. Too many
          statesmen and their pundit lackeys and nannies will urge Mr. Gore to drop the fight,
          will urge us all to ignore the thefts, the putsch-like behavior of the Republican mob
          that terrified the Miami-Dade re-count officials into fleeing from their responsibility
          (no matter how they’ve changed their story now to deny their cowardice). As Tom
          Daschle and Dick Gephardt pointed out the day after Katherine Harris’ certification,
          we will eventually know the truth about the 9,000-plus undercounted Miami votes.
          Florida’s Freedom of Information Act will sooner or later make those ballots
          available for inspection—probably after it’s too late to prevent the inauguration of
          the wrong man. But the pundits say, “Time to pack it in and forget it all.” Just when
          it’s getting good; just when we’re seeing the true snarling face of the illegitimate
          Bush Presidency. I say pursue the facts, pursue the truth to the bitter end.

          So let’s linger for a moment on that little operation in Nassau County, on this ugly
          new evidence of extralegal intervention by Katherine Harris. Some will say the
          story’s moved on beyond her. Some might say that the more urgent, egregious
          issue—the one that sealed the Big Steal—was the mob intimidation of the
          Miami-Dade counting board. The ignorant army whipped to a frenzy by the
          demagoguery of the pinstriped thug, James Baker, and the Austin pinhead in chief,
          the mob that invaded the Miami re-count site and engaged in the kind of threatening
          behavior that may well have changed American history by denying Gore the legally
          mandated hand re-count there. The first Presidential election to be won by a mob, a
          mob we’ve now learned (from the Nov. 27 Wall Street Journal) was bought and
          paid for (and put up in Hiltons) by G.O.P. House whip Tom DeLay.

          (One of the most sickening examples of the Big Lie tactics employed by the Bush
          campaign and their camp followers is the utterly irrelevant comparison of the
          Miami-Dade invasion to Jesse Jackson’s street demonstrations in Palm Beach. The
          Jackson dem-onstrators did not invade, break the windows and pound violently on
          the doors of re-count officials; they didn’t surround and harass an official legal
          observer from the other side, or punch and kick people in the vicinity of the count,
          as the Miami mob did.)

          So yes, the story has moved on from Katherine Harris—although she briefly
          returned to center stage on Nov. 26 to deny the Palm Beach election board a
          chance to include their marathon count in the total, and then staged her junta-like
          Sunday-night certification spectacle after taking a few last shots at the Florida
          Supreme Court (and signing off with a fervent “God bless America”).

          Let’s linger a bit more on Ms. Harris, because it’s clear she’s been busy as a bee
          backstage, helping to engineer the clandestine operation in Nassau County and
          smuggling the apparently illicit acceptance of absentee-ballot Bush votes in several
          scattered counties into the final count.

          I’ve felt from the beginning that the ridicule of Ms. Harris’ appearance was sexist,
          ageist and looks-ist. And perhaps a new phenomenon—makeup-ist..Mascara
          Marx-ism: the belief, most explicitly articulated in a catty makeup analysis in the
          Washington Post Style section, that bad makeup decisions are a sure sign of bad
          politics. As if a failure to be styled by Kevin Aucoin disqualifies one from being
          taken seriously (when often the opposite is true).

          If the makeup matter is a red herring— and I believe it is—the question of Ms.
          Harris’ naked partisanship and its source is not. Because it has been so excessive
          and self-destructive, and did so much damage initially to her own cause, it has given
          rise to some wild theories to explain it. That’s the only way to explain what I’ll call
          “The Rumor.” The Rumor is also worth examining (or at least mentioning) as an
          index of the way America is still divided into two nations: Media and Media
          Consumers. Almost everyone in the media I know has heard The Rumor, and yet
          only one paragraph about it has appeared in print.

          It’s an index as well of the partisanship of rumorology. Think of all the rumors
          about Hillary and Bill the right-wing press has rushed into print without
          corroboration, up to and including murder.

          It’s interesting: If it were a rumor about Hillary, you know Matt Drudge would have
          rushed into print with it. He would have justified it by saying that people at The
          Times are buzzing about The Rumor but refusing to print it because they’re all
          liberals. Well, people at The Times are buzzing about the Harris Rumor, and I
          suspect Matt Drudge himself knows about it. I wonder, why his sudden attack of
          reticence? Could it be because she’s a Republican?

          Personally, I think reporting on rumors and the agendas behind them can be a
          legitimate subject of journalism, or at least of cultural history. The kind of rumors
          that fly about in times of national crisis, true or not, are often valuable clues to
          deeper currents in the national psyche. Someday after someone else prints The
          Rumor, I may have more to say on the matter. For the moment, I will merely quote
          one paragraph from a New York Times story on Katherine Harris which, a source at
          The Times told me, was an oblique and laundered reference to The Rumor—and
          part of a paragraph from the New York Post.

          Just to put it in context, I first heard The Rumor when a woman I know called and
          told me that “everyone at The Times is buzzing about it.” When I spoke to someone
          at The Times I was told that, yes, in fact everyone was talking about it, and I was
          referred to the cryptic paragraph in the Monday, Nov. 20 edition of The Times, the
          third paragraph in a profile of Katherine Harris headlined “A Human Lightning Rod
          In a Vote-Counting Storm.” A paragraph that read:

          “She is reviled by some as Gov. Jeb Bush’s ignorant puppet (actually, far more
          unflattering terms have been used) and heralded by others as an icon of grace and courage.”

          “Far more unflattering terms”? As in Jeb’s “extremely ignorant puppet”? I’m not
          going to say any more. I will leave The Rumor—which I’m told is now being
          investigated by The Washington Post and other newspapers and
          newsweeklies—buried in those parentheses for now, except to add this item from
          Neal Travis’ Nov. 22 column in the New York Post: “I hear that some major
          magazines—and I don’t mean the tabloids—are delving deeply into [The Rumor
          about] Katherine Harris.”

          Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that those on the right who profess to be
          horrified by the treatment of Katherine Harris should now rethink and repent their
          savage treatment of Hillary. The fact that major news outlets may be investigating
          The Rumor doesn’t mean there’s any truth to it. And I don’t think I would have
          mentioned The Rumor at all if the news of this most recent, most egregious petty
          theft in Nassau County hadn’t revealed that, even after the Florida Supreme Court
          rebuffed her, Ms. Harris has been relentlessly maneuvering for every advantage
          behind the scenes. Jeb’s “ignorant puppet”? More like Jeb’s ventriloquist; she’s the
          one pulling the Bush brothers’ strings.

          Have I become too much of a partisan? Am I seeing only one side of this amazing
          story? Have I lost my skeptical Mysterian detachment? I have to admit I’ve found
          myself in a constant state of outrage ever since the 24-hour period that began with
          James (“Generalissimo”) Baker’s snarling, sneering midnight press conference, the
          moment the mask dropped from the Bush campaign (as it did once before, when
          they savaged John McCain in South Carolina), the moment when this thuggish
          mouthpiece capped his distorted and dishonest denunciation of the just-announced
          Flor-ida Supreme Court decision with a threat to abrogate the democratic voting
          process entirely by a resort to the Republican legislature to overturn any result he
          didn’t like, electoral or judicial.

          Baker’s vicious diatribe against judicial review kicked off a shameful period of
          demagoguery and mob intimidation that seems to have won the election for George
          Bush by extralegal means. The Day of the Big Steal.

          Baker’s Big Lie—that the Florida Su-preme Court “rewrote the law,” when it was
          merely trying to reconcile two conflicting laws—was echoed by his pinhead boss in
          Austin the following day, when George W., looking ever more like a hollow,
          wooden ventriloquist’s dummy, emerged from his rigorous schedule of workouts
          and games of fetch with his dog Spot to display his ignorance of the American
          judicial system. (One of the late-night comics said that George W. turned to playing
          fetch with Spot “after he lost two out of three to him in Scrabble.”)

          The court used “legalistic language,” George W. claimed. Um, excuse me, George
          W.— courts often use what is known as legal language when they’re interpreting
          the law. Just because words of more than one syllable confuse you doesn’t mean
          they were designed to confuse. The “legalistic language” (does anyone believe he
          actually even tried to read it?) “rewrote the law,” George W. whined—thus
          delegitimizing the routine work of the judicial system, which is to interpret and
          reconcile the law.

          But it was this poisonous and ignorant demagoguery, I’m convinced, that in the
          hours following the Florida Supreme Court decision helped whip the equally
          ignorant Republican mob into storming the Miami-Dade re-count site, frightening
          the election workers off their job and thereby hijacking the election by force.

          I know Representative Jerry Nadler was going way too far when he said this
          sequence of events had “the whiff of fascism” about it. But the midnight threat of
          extra-legal means to delegitimize the judicial process by the pinstriped thug, and the
          ignorant echoing of it by the Austin pinhead, must be held accountable for the “mob
          action” (Joe Lieberman’s words) that followed and sealed the Big Steal. The mask
          is off, and beneath the mask I don’t see “fascism”—but I did get a Costa-Gavras
          vibe. Mr. Baker’s snarling thuggish rage, his poison-ous effort to delegitimize the
          judicial system, reminded me of Costa-Gavras’ Z, the thriller about the Greek
          colonels’ coup.

          Okay, I agree that’s going too far. This is not Athens under the Greek colonels.
          It’s far more crummy and second-rate than that.
          It’s not Z; it’s not even X or Y.
          It’s W.