America: Cinema-goers who saw Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 may recall that it opened with the Congress session to certify the 2000 presidential election results. A sick-looking Al Gore, in his dual role as outgoing vice president and president of the Senate, was shown presiding over the event that would officially anoint George Bush as President.
As narrator, Moore explained that if any congressperson wanted to raise an objection, he or she had to have the support of one senator. Several African American members raised objections about the denial of the vote to thousands of black voters in Florida. No senator came to their aid and "one after another they were told to sit down and shut up."
Gore it seems had told fellow senators the battle was lost and not to object. This week the House and Senate met to ratify the results of the 2004 election in the same chamber on Capitol Hill, with Dick Cheney presiding. When it came to Ohio, African American Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones stood up and protested that the Ohio votes "were not, under all known circumstances, regularly given", adding triumphantly that she had a senator in the shape of Barbara Boxer of California to support her.
The vice president, notbest pleased at the first successful objection since 1877, had no option but to order separate House and Senate debates on the Ohio irregularities. The Boxer Rebellion never threatened the outcome, as Bush won Ohio by 100,000 votes, but the protest enabled some Democrats to air concerns about flawed voting.
Boxer complained that some black voters in Ohio had to wait hours in the rain to vote that 68 machines were kept in warehouses, and that in one district of 638 voters, George Bush got 4,258 votes (later excluded from the count).
In the end the Ohio vote was approved and George Bush was officially declared the winner, 65 days after the election.
Nothing much has changed since then it seems. The nation remains just as divided according to an AP poll which shows Bush's approval rating at 49 per cent (Nixon, Reagan and Clinton all had high ratings after re-election) with 49 per cent disapproving of his performance.
One of those who disapproves of his Iraq policy is a Bush family friend, Brent Ashcroft, chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. As the administration's most high-level dissident, he complains that Iraq is a disaster, that the elections could cause civil war, and NATO or the UN should take over.
His dissent is as startling as that in the Kremlin of Vladimir Putin's economic advisor Andrei Illarionov who said recently that Putin's treatment of the Russian oil company Yukos was "the fraud of the year." The Russian adviser still has his job.
But this week Brent Scowcroft was fired by President Bush. Dissent is out of favour in the Bush White House, as evidenced by the dumping of reluctant warrior Colin Powell.
Powell's successor, Condoleezza Rice, has been assembling her new team for the State Department prior to confirmation hearings on January 18th, and yesterday Bush formally approved her choice of Robert Zoellick as her deputy. This is a bit of a rebuff for conservatives who had lobbied for under-secretary John Bolton, a neo-conservative and arch foe of Colin Powell, to get the job.
Zoellick is the administration's top trade negotiator and is regarded as an internationalist who has good relations with Europe. He and the incoming secretary know each other from the time when they both worked in the first Bush White House - where Rice was a protege of the then national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft.
Bolton will be replaced by Bob Joseph, the official who was involved in the inclusion of the infamous uranium-from-Africa phrase in Bush's state-of-the-union speech in 2003.
In October this column featured the televised spat on the CNN between Jon Stewart, the anchor of the Comedy Channel's fake-news Daily Show, and Tucker Carlson, co-host of CNN's daily Crossfire, in which pundits from right and left shout each other down. Stewart said the show was hurting America and that as partisan hacks, the hosts were part of the problem - and called Carlson a "big dick".
CNN's new president, Jonathan Klein, has now decided to scrap Crossfire after 22 years. Carlson has moved to MSNBC. Viewers need "useful information in a dangerous world", not "a bunch of guys screaming at each other" Klein told The Washington Post.
Questions have been raised about whether people were getting "useful information" from another pundit, Armstrong Williams, a top black conservative commentator who liked to promote the president's education reforms on his syndicated TV and radio shows.
No wonder. Williams was paid $240,000 to do so by the Bush administration, according to documents obtained by USA Today newspaper. The contract was part of a $1 million education department deal with a PR company that produced "video news releases" designed to look like news reports. The use of similar videos by the Bush administration to promote a prescription drug plan was adjudged illegal by the Government Accountability Office last year.
At least John Stewart calls his show 'fake news'.
This column also related in November how Republicans in Congress had struck down a rule requiring party leaders to stand down if faced with felony charges. They had just re-elected as majority leader Tom DeLay of Texas who is facing indictment by a Texas grand jury. Republican rank and file took a lot of heat from constituents and have now reversed themselves.
However they also made it more difficult for the House Ethics Committee to begin an investigation of a member by scrapping a rule that a tied vote on the committee of five Republicans and five Democrats was sufficient to start an investigation. Now a majority vote is required, which means any investigation of a Republican will require one of the party to break ranks.
Ted Kennedy is still haunted by Chappaquiddick. Talk shows yesterday gleefully replayed a clip of his comment in a Senate hearing on Thursday to attorney general-nominee Roberto Gonzales, about a 'water-board' torture technique. With "all its descriptions about drowning someone", said Kennedy, it should have made Gonzales reflect: "I certainly wouldn't have had a part of that, as a human being."