Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and MSNBC. He is the author, most recently, of It Ain't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive : The Promise of Bruce Springsteen (Cornell University Press, 1998). He is also a contributing editor to IntellectualCapital.com. His e-mail address is ericalterman@intellectualcapital.com.

The degree of hypocrisy operating on behalf of George Bush's candidacy for the presidency in this election is absolutely mind-boggling. Saturday morning's press conference by James Baker is just the latest in a series of amazingly high-handed attempts to undermine the democratic process in this country.

Just days ago, we were told by the Bush camp and their lapdogs in the punditocracy, that the worst imaginable outcome for this election would be to have it decided in the courts, rather than by a fair recount. "The purpose of our national election is to establish a constitutional government, not unending legal wrangling," James Baker explained.

It turns out they changed their minds. Now they want to go to court to try to stop a recount from taking place, thereby allowing the final decision to be determined exactly where they said it shouldn't be.

Bush Team Hypocrisies

Baker's flip-flop follows another astonishing switcheroo by the Republicans. Before the actual votes were cast, Bush camp officials were openly planning to try to switch the Electoral College vote if their man won the popular vote but lost among official electors. The "legitimacy" of the election process and the presidency itself, they argued, could be protected no other way. Today we see it's the other way around. Al Gore won the popular by absolutely everybody's count by nearly 200,000 while Bush is trying to claim the entire presidency on the basis of barely three hundred disputed votes in Florida.

The very people who cast those votes are demanding a chance to make their votes count the way they wanted them to. Palm Beach voters complained early and often about problems at the polls. By mid-morning many had called commissioners to complain about the confusing "butterfly" ballot. Some voters said they appealed to poll workers to help them with the ballots, only to find the workers as confused and harried as they were. Some voters said they caught their error while still in the voting booth, and requested, and received, new ballots; others said they were denied another chance by precinct workers.

By the end of the day, 3,407 Palm Beach votes went to Buchanan, far more than in any other Florida county; and inconceivable among elderly South Florida Jews. Nineteen thousand votes were discounted because of double voting for president; and 10,000 were thrown away because there were no votes for president on them. Give these people a fair chance to make their votes heard with a legal election ballot and Al Gore is the legitimately elected 43rd president of the United States, winner in the Electoral College, winner in the popular vote. But of course the Bush team cannot worry about that. To hell with legitimacy, they want to win, period. They can worry about their legitimacy once they are sitting pretty in the Oval Office.

Punditocracy Speaks For Bush

Okay, so there's nothing so shocking about a bunch of politicians trying to win their prize by hook and by crook. The Democrats would be no different if the positions were reversed. But what the heck has happened to the media? Most of the punditocracy is so disgracefully in the tank for George Bush that they are doing double backflips in print and on television to come up with arguments to prove what was white yesterday is black today.

Here is George Will writing before former Secretary of State and Bush representative James Baker decided to take the matter to court: "His serial mendacity should be remembered during his seamless post-election transition to desperately seeking lawyering strategies and a friendly court to hand him the presidential election." It's funny when you think about it. Which candidate does he mean? After all, only one has officially deployed lawyers to hand him the presidential election. (The efforts on the Democratic side have all been initiated by citizens' groups and are aimed only at ensuring a fair count.)

Virtually every major newspaper in the country has gone along with this disturbing and anti-Democratic notion that it is somehow unpatriotic for Al Gore to demand a fair election, one that gives everyone who voted a chance to have their votes matter. When Gore campaign manager William Daley said exactly the same thing that every Bushite including "W" himself claimed -- that his candidate "should be awarded a victory in Florida and be our next president," the Washington Post editors reacted in horror. They called his remarks "a poisonous thing to say in these extraordinary and unsettling circumstances, and called on the candidate to immediately repudiate them. The Wall Street Journal, always good for a laugh, actually went on to compare these remarks a attempted "Gore coup d'etat."

Let The Recount Continue

Oh Really? Since when does the word "coup" apply to the faithful following of existing laws? Nevermind the laws say the Bush campaign. Nevermind the will of the people. "For the good of the count and for the sake of our standing in the world, the campaigning should end and the business of an orderly transition should begin" said James Baker, to no apparent opprobrium.

In this crazy-quilt world of a media-wide rollover for Bush at every step of the process, no one seems to point out that, in another context, those would be fighting words. After all, Bush and Baker seem to think that America's standing in the world really so fragile it can't handle an honest election -- no matter how long it takes. A country as weak and wimpy as all that is hardly worth being president of.