Imagine that a few more of those old folk had managed to make sense of that butterfly ballot and had managed to cast valid votes, and that Gore had come in a few hundred votes ahead on that first count - and that Gore had then acted exactly the same way as Bush in resisting manual recounts, and Bush had acted exactly the same as Gore in going to court to try to get them.

Would the people who have supported and defended the actions of Bush and Gore over the past month have stuck with their principles, or gone with their candidates?

I'm sure there are some who would have stuck with the principles. But I suspect that they'd have been outnumbered by people who stuck with the candidates.

I find it a bit hard to swallow the notion that all the people who think that manual recounts are necessary in a close result just happen to be Gore supporters and all the people who think that they are not justified just happen to be Bush supporters.

And yet of course none of them admit to going in for double standards, under which the same behaviour is a dirty trick or a justified tactic according to who is doing it. It just happens by sheer coincidence that the view they hold about this purely technical matter happens to coincide with the interests of their preferred candidates.

It'd be refreshing to have someone say "This is a fight in which winning is everything. It doesn't matter to me what the actual votes was - what matters to me is that the counting is organised in such a way that my man wins."

Maybe if people could admit that, they could start to face up to the fact that thinking like this subverts and degrades the whole Constitution that they claim to regard so highly. And face up to the implications of the fact that they have a President-elect who thinks like that.