The actions by both candidates' cronies in Florida are truly disturbing and cast doubt on whether we will ever reach a fair conclusion.  How can we reach a judicious outcome when both campaigns have employed legions of lawyers to try and make  the Florida election turn in their favor (no offense to my lawyer friends)?  The day we let both campaigns back into Florida to  battle it out for those votes was the day that Florida became a quest not for justice, but for biased, subjective victory

Clearly, the closeness of the vote in Florida and the repercussions of its outcome require close scrutiny.  Indeed, Florida law   mandates such scrutiny with an election this close.  Procedures need to be followed to insure a fair and accurate count. However, it is clear that those procedures have been manipulated by both sides in an effort to win Florida by any means  necessary while employing the same distasteful tactics usually employed during an election to justify those means.

I don't know what the preferable approach would have been, but it seems to me that letting the campaigns set up "war rooms" in those states and then holding daily press conferences to put their spin on events is both confusing to the country and inconsistent with what needed to happen in Florida.  Political campaigns are for elections....and the election is over.  Florida is should now be about properly counting votes, not about a second public image campaign to win Florida.

What is happening now is simply a result of the lawyers and politicians on the ground there controlling the outcome.  Lawyers  and politicians (and especially combinations of the two like Christopher and Baker) are biased toward their parties and their  employers.  When they determine courses of action, they will almost always choose the ones that unilaterally favor their  position.  Judges, on the other hand, are accustomed to listening to both sides and searching for the truth.  The difference  between a judges more deductive approach and a politician/lawyers more inductive approach is absolutely critical here.  In  retrospect, it may have been smarter for each campaign to select a group of judges selected by both campaigns (if they could  not mutually agree on a handful, then they could each select the same number) down to Florida empowered to resolve this  judiciously rather than politically.

Since we failed to take a more judicious approach, we must now be mindful and skeptical of the political campaigns being   waged in Florida.  We must not be fooled by either party's rhetoric.  There are typically four realities to every political story:
1) the positive or legitimate aspects of their candidate's story, 2) the negative or illegitimate aspects of  the opposition's story, 3) positive or legitimate aspects of the opposition's story, and 4) the negative or illegitimate aspects about their own story. Unfortunately, politicians typically include only the first two in their rhetoric.  So if you listen to only one side, you will only know half the story.  The whole truth usually lies somewhere in between what both campaigns tell you.  Like judges do in court, citizens must struggle to determine the accuracy of all four parts; a process that is difficult, time consuming, and frustrating because very few people have a vested interest in and can be trusted with the duty of providing unbiased, accurate, and reliable information.  So, when we find ourselves simply listening to, believing in, and repeating only the arguments presented by either the Bush Campaign or the Gore campaign, we are willingly making ourselves a pawn in their political game.  We must all be skeptical and vigilant in our quest for truth.