HBO's "Recount": Hindsight is 20/20

It was a roller-coaster ride that brought back a slew of memories -- the start-and-stop recounts in Florida, the hanging chads, the recounting of the overseas military ballots, the purging of 20,000 voters from the rolls (most of them not convicted felons), the possibility of the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature deciding who would get the state's 25 electoral votes if the popular vote could not be discerned by the December deadline, the state Supreme Court's ordering of the recounting of statewide undervotes, only to be overruled by the federal Supreme Court at the 11th hour -- it had all the makings of a great novel, and we all lived through it. It is a wonder why it took so long to tell the tale on film.

I remember feeling the same way as I believe the majority of us felt at the time. It had been more than a month since the election. The United States, the shining beacon of democracy for the world, had descended into a level of bickering over an election that was unbecoming of our status as the world's first true democracy. We wanted to just get it over with. Who cared if Bush led by only 154 votes, or 537 votes, or 930 votes, depending on who was keeping tally. Even though there were tens of thousands of votes at play, and Bush's initial 1,784 vote lead had been steadily dwindling the more votes were recounted, we just wanted it to be over already.

Now, with nearly eight years of hindsight, more than 4,000 of our troops and untold tens of thousands of Iraqis dead, the economy in the dumps, gas prices creeping past $4 a gallon and our standing in the world rivaling that of the Soviets in the late 1980s, it doesn't seem such a bad idea to have waited a little longer to find out for certain who really won that election.