I have nothing but sympathy for whoever is stuck with being the next president of these United States. I feel sorry for Gore because even if every vote in Florida is counted again using the most impeccable standard and he scrapes by with a win, he will be unfairly accused of having stolen one of the screwiest elections in American history.

Right now, no matter what Gore chooses to do he is a loser. If he concedes, he lost the election. If he fights for the fair recount and loses, he looks like a sore loser. If he continues to fight for a fair recount and wins, he will become just another lame duck president no one will respect.

And I feel sorry for George W. Bush because he is a moron.

He isn’t just like some good old boy who got promoted one step higher than he should have, he is like Cliff Roberts in “Flowers for Algernon.” What is most alarming about Bush is that nearly half the voting population could listen to his claptrap during the debates and find him appealing. I thought his little self-satisfied smirk when he was talking about the death penalty was real folksy indeed. I’m surprised he could keep from touching himself.

Right now we are wallowing in political hypocrisy as Republicans work themselves into a frenzy like sharks who catch the smallest scent of blood in the water. This election is almost theirs and nothing, especially the truth, is going to get in their way.

A full and accurate count of all the votes in Florida is not contrary to democracy and anybody who tells you this election has already been won several times is obviously unfamiliar with the standard for counting votes. Machines are used because they are fast, but they have an error rate. We accept this error because it is fairly small, only about 5 percent. When an election comes down to a few hundred votes, it becomes necessary to make sure and only by counting the votes, all the votes, by hand can we know for sure.

When the recount was stopped in Miami-Dade because the Republican protesters put up a fuss, that amounted to stealing the election. To accuse Gore of being a sore loser and of trying to steal this election is hypocrisy. If the vote had gone a few more in the other direction, we would be right where we are now, except Bush would be the one trying to convince everyone in the country we need a fair and accurate count before we could call this race.

The lesson to be learned here is that Nader was right. He didn’t garner too much support, but the man was right on target when he said there is no difference between these two men. If there were a real difference, the vote would not have been split almost perfectly in half.

The vote was so close because most Americans watch these candidates and try to decide who they want to vote for and make up their minds on criteria that is superficial at best. For those who like their president homespun and folksy, Bush looks like their good-hearted but often drunk uncle. He is the one who comes over for the holidays, and gets a buzz going that entertains the kids for hours before running his car into a guard rail on the way home.

Throughout this campaign, Republicans have said if we want to criticize Bush we should do it on the issues. Why? This election wasn’t about issues, it was about character. Bush comes out of his Austin hidey hole and says we should vote for him because he has the kind of character America needs in a president.

Well, America doesn’t need another inarticulate drunk as president. We already had Ulysses S. Grant and look where that got us: scandal and ineffective civil rights enforcement.

The only good thing about a Bush presidency will be that Saturday Night Live sketches should take a turn for the hilarious and Lord knows Jay Leno could use the help. While Bush opens up the Alaskan wilderness for rapacious oil companies and pushes for the same kind of “successful” education reforms that took the great state of Texas from somewhere near the bottom of the heap to somewhere just slightly higher on the bottom of the heap, we can all rest assured that Bush will provide more good video clips than Gerald Ford.

America will survive a Bush presidency in exactly the same way that Russia survived Boris Yeltsin: by making fun of our red-faced leader and wondering what the hell he’s on. Bush isn’t crazy like Reagan and doesn’t have a pre-packaged enemy like the Soviet Union to lob insults at. Iraq has been done before and Bush isn’t familiar enough with what other countries exist to insult them, let alone bomb them for ratings points.

And while Bush is challenged, one gets the impression he knows his limitations. He is a moron with enough sense to know he burned a lot of brain cells back when he was drinking himself into a stupor every night. That self-satisfied, rich-boy grin belies an insecurity. He will be merely a figurehead with an experienced cabinet to pull his strings and we can all use four years of “subliminable.”

While many liberals might bemoan his term in office, there is nothing better than a jackass Republican to make the Democrats look good and keep the right from bragging on itself. Good luck, Dubya, you’re gonna need it.