istory is vastly oversupplied with victors who tarnished their triumph by their manner of winning it.
And George W. Bush soiled his grab for the White House last week by the venal and vindictive attack he launched on the Florida Supreme Court. That institution, created to be the final word on interpretation of the state's laws - on elections and everything else - was damaged in a wanton and partisan fashion by the assault unleashed by the Texas governor.
But you have to wonder if Bush was his own triggerman, or if he is just an idle passenger on the runaway bus steered by Jim Baker and the other cronies of the Bush, Bush, & Bush political combine. How long will it be, one wonders idly, before Dick Cheney is slipped over the side and Baker emerges as the vice presidential substitute, the real ventriloquist to Dubbaya's dummy?
Whatever confidence the nation at large had in the Republican presidential nominee had to be diminished by the way in which he's maneuvering to forestall a fair recount of the cursed Florida vote. At times cocky, at times loopy, Bush Jr. stammered through a mercifully brief press availability - to call it a ''conference'' seems oddly inappropriate.
With his grasp of fundamentals still on the shaky side, Bush seemed unclear on the concept that it's the courts that interpret the laws, not the executive. You can usually get a hint of what someone is trying to hide when he denounces it too loudly in others. To those of us hailing from the state that voted 60 percent to 32 percent against Bush, the crisply coordinated cries of ''they're trying to steal the election!'' ring hollow.
Should not someone remind the Bush Entitlement Brigade that Al Gore actually got more popular votes than Dubbaya? And more electoral votes, if you set aside the disputed votes in Elian-land? Baker's barely-controlled fury when he trolled the possibility of the GOP's Florida Legislature to unhinge the state Supreme Court was a breathtaking escalation of hostilities.
Make no mistake: These are men on horseback, on elephant-back, on mopeds, or on giraffes, if that's what it'll take. This is the party that let Newt Gingrich shut down the government. It is the party that tried and failed to seize power via impeachment. It is a party that raised and spent more money than ever before in God's creation to seize the one branch beyond its tentacles. It is the party of Moral Superiority! Make no mistake, this Republican horde has the Lawd on its side, and the rest of us are infidels. Just ask Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Charlton Heston makes three.
As I track it on the old religiosity Geiger counter, the We Are Morally Superior Party got off and rolling with Gennifer Flowers in the '92 campaign. There followed the Clinton draft letter, the did-he-inhale-or-what crusade, and following upon Clinton's first election, there came gays in the military, followed quickly by Travelgate, Filegate, Whitewatergate, and all those other gates that swung wide but never felled the Clintons.
Eight years of right-wing pep rallies have given us a Republican House, barely, a Republican-controlled Senate, by the thinnest of margins, and maybe a Republican president who will have won with fewer people voting for him than for the other guy. The rotting carcass of the Florida election gives off a stench that wafts from sea to shining sea.
Irregularities in the count in a state controlled by yet another Bush and a Republican Legislature do not placate the fears of those of us in states that voted the other way. It was a Republican goon squad of protesters that intimidated the hapless Miami-Dade election supervisors into refusing to conduct the recount that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered unanimously.
That mob was abetted by another crowd of Cuban right-wingers outside, according to one Democratic official outraged by what he termed ''the greatest injustice I've ever seen in my career in politics.'' Mob action on the ground is accompanied by a massive right-wing propaganda effort. The desperation of the Morally Superior Party is best viewed through the prism of their little publications.
I remain baffled by the prurience of the Morally Superiors when it comes to denouncing the Democrats. The right wing has coalesced around the cadaverously contemptuous core of William F. Buckley's National Review, whose final issue before the election was headlined: ''A Farewell to the Big Creep - FINALLY!''
This was a nasty little package of bumptious boosterism focused mostly on the perfidy of the Clintons, the Gores, the liberals, the blacks and gays, and all the rest of those who are not God's Chillun in Big Bill Buckley's Bible. It gave rather short shrift to the slim credentials of the conservative hero in this morality tale, Governor Capital Punishment of the Great State of Texas.
But you add it all up, the refusal to allow a fair recount in Florida, the national propaganda barrage, the invective hurled from the congressional kennel, the naked assault on the highest court in Florida, the orchestration of the goon squads in Miami, and you wind up with an ugly picture of rule-or-ruin Republicanism.
It is the question for which the answer is now too painfully obvious: How can these bawling, brawling preachers of moral superiority employ such tactics, without irretrievably soiling the very prize they covet?
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
