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http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a2e40396fb9.htm

Although I object to subsidized victimhood as much as the next free-market conservative, my current beef with Democrats stems from what they have done to my mind rather than what they have done to my wallet. In the traumatized part of my brain formerly occupied by the music for the Small World song at Disneyland, I now hear Democrats calling continuously for a ?full, fair, and accurate? recount of Florida votes. Even as multiple legal setbacks take the polish off that dishonest phrase and his political career draws to an ignominious close, Al Gore seems blind to the fact that what he calls full, fair and accurate is more truthfully described as partial, partisan, and error-prone. Accuracy is worth striving for, but if it were the universal salve that Al Gore pretends it is, the American lexicon would never have made room for the phrase ?close enough for government work.? Nevertheless, one can sympathize with a desire to be accurate, even while viewing it with cynicism, and pointing out that it is often at odds with the other Gore goal, fairness. Memo to the Democrats: Fairness is completely inappropriate in the winner-take-all political contests for which this country is famous. Appeals to that ideal lose arguments on moral, historical, legal, and cultural grounds.

On the moral plane, fairness takes a beating from hypocrisy. Next time a Democrat bleats about fairness while rounding the metaphorical bases toward disenfranchisement, ask yourself why Democrats opposed to abortion are never asked to make speeches at party conventions. How fair is that? You might also ask why journalists who decry conservative invective never dream of admitting their own biases. When CNN anchor Bernard Shaw grilled Republican vice-president-elect dick Cheney about his health, most of the media conveniently forgot that our current president has been hiding his own medical records for more than eight years.

If moral arguments are not to your taste, American history, like life itself, is rife with examples of disdain for fair play. This may perhaps be because fairness is a concept usually identified with English prep schools and that Victorian bully who standardized bare-knuckle boxing, the Marquis of Queensbury. Recall the American Revolution, where George Washington enjoyed his greatest success as a military commander by engaging in guerilla-style combat with British troops. As P.J. O?Rourke once wrote, even the contrast in diets between combatants was, in retrospect, unfair. Men fortified by ?tea and crumpets? fought men fortified by ?raw squirrel and whiskey,? and we all know who won that war. Four generations later, one could hardly say that the overwhelming numerical advantage enjoyed by Federal troops under Ulysses S. Grant was fair to the Confederacy, or to Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia.

Law, of course, has no place for fairness, except in the minds of activist judges who treat the Constitution as a launch pad for various social engineering schemes. In that respect the title we give Supreme Court judges is a misnomer, because their job is to interpret law, not to dispense justice. That this goes unnoticed by lawyers to the left of Ann Coulter is stark testimony to the decline of educational standards at all levels.

Even popular culture consigns fairness to its rightful place in the minor leagues. Although it recently hired a pair of off-camera Republican consultants, the popular TV drama ?West Wing? is as unapologetically partisan as the day is long. Responding to a fawning article about the show on the Salon.com web site, one reader pointed out that what the show?s fictional president has that Al Gore and George W. Bush do not are ?political enemies that follow a script handed to them by liberals.? Few people seem to mind.

Over on the big screen, the movie ?Charlie?s Angels? offers more evidence that fairness is a leaky raft on which to brave the tides of public opinion. In the movie, attractive actresses Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu update roles first played by a trio of beautiful women in 1976. Each of the original crime-fighting ?angels? was smarter and sexier than the villains that she helped to apprehend. The movie retains that formula but adds martial arts and athletic stunts. Mercifully, Chad in this film is a boyfriend, not a piece of confetti with political implications. Barrymore produced the film and does not like guns, so when her character is tied to a chair and confronted by a handful of muscular men, she simply fights her way out of trouble. Her colleagues perform similar feats of unlikely derring-do. In fact, every woman in the cast cheerfully defies the laws of gravity, physics, and probability without so much as smudging her makeup.

Like most of her Hollywood cronies, Barrymore is an unreconstructed liberal with a visceral dislike for anything even vaguely conservative. In spite of that limitation, Charlie?s Angels suggests that Miss Barrymore is smarter than the self-styled Inventor of the Internet and the so-called Conscience of the Senate. Unlike Gore, Lieberman, and legions of mind-numbing Democrats, Barrymore never pretends to be fair. That is precisely why her current movie remains a guilty pleasure. Barrymore has her fellow Democrats beat in other ways, too, because her lifetime of public service is shorter but indisputably more entertaining and less dangerous to liberty than their own.