Politics & Power Quote by Vincent Bugliosi

Bugliosi’s line lands like a legal objection disguised as a punchline: not merely wrong, but unbelievable. The first move is procedural outrage - there’s “a book out” attacking Gore - as if publishing itself becomes an ethical breach when aimed at the wrong target. That framing matters because it shifts the argument away from Gore’s flaws and toward the culture’s appetite for scapegoats. Bugliosi isn’t pleading Gore’s perfection; he’s indicting the post-2000 ecosystem that treated Gore as fair game precisely because he didn’t win, and because he wouldn’t perform the kind of combative grievance politics the moment was beginning to reward.

Calling Gore “the most unfortunate loser in political history” is more than sympathy; it’s a verdict on contingency. “Unfortunate” does the heavy lifting: the loss is cast less as a failure of persuasion than a collision with forces outside normal democratic expectations - the Florida recount chaos, the Supreme Court’s intervention, the sense of a procedural coup without tanks. Bugliosi, a prosecutor by temperament even when writing as an author, is making a case about narrative malpractice: if the loser is “unfortunate,” then piling on looks less like critique and more like cruelty, even complicity.

The subtext is also defensive of legitimacy. Attacking Gore after 2000 can read as retroactive justification: if you can paint him as contemptible, the outcome feels easier to live with. Bugliosi is pushing back on that psychological laundering, insisting that the victim of a historically anomalous defeat shouldn’t be recast as the villain for sport.