Lewis, I realize you are a respected and intelligent poster to this website.
I would deeply appreciate it if you would not refer to me as a liar. You can call me uninformed or misled, or even ugly. Perhaps dumb might be appropriate. But not a liar. Please.
But I don't consider you any of these other things. So why would I want to call you them? *shrugs*
Notice that I called you a "liar" only in regards to the quoted part - the first part of your post, and (if you read closely enough) directly contradicted by the wikipedia quote. The presentation of the facts there is slanted but broadly correct, and I'm not calling you anything for it.
Nobody was pledged to Harry Byrd. Harry Byrd was not a presidential candidate that year. Nobody knew who the unpledged electors would be voting for. We are talking of a distinction of pledged Democratic electors versus unpledged Democratic electors, nothing else. You could even make an argument that we are talking of unconditional Kennedy electors versus conditional Kennedy electors, and that the indy vote in Mississippi and Louisiana should be added to Kennedy's popular vote total as well (I'm not actually endorsing that argument, btw.) Certainly the public expectation was that Kennedy would be able to count on the segregationist Electors if he needed them - at a political price.
That's the one thing.
The other thing is of course the background of the claims' popularity. "Democrats oughtn't to complain that we stole 2000 because they stole 1960." Which is a frankly disgusting lie that one would hope has really, really run its course.
