Politicians—here's a sunburst—— don't always mean what they say. When Democrats insist that they want every vote to be counted, you can, as one of America's most distinguished propagandists has been known to put it, take it to the bank. No kidding: when they register a guy as the Space Cowboy in one precinct, the Gangster of Love in another, and Maurice in a third, they sincerely want all of his votes to be counted.

In the state of Washington, the Democrats' ham—fisted theft of the governorship is, at last, a fait accompli—unless the colossal effrontery of the heist manages to shake the local Republicans out of their torpor and inspires them to 'find' a few votes of their own. It promises to be a steep uphill climb, as the rules are clear: when the Democrat takes the lead, the buzzer sounds. For now, the nation can focus on important matters, such as the Ohio recount.

Innocents may be wondering what would prompt officials of a state won by a margin of one hundred twenty thousand votes to undertake so expensive and time—consuming a procedure. The purpose of a recount is to make sure that the winner really won, and such a margin can't possibly be the product of counting errors. A more accurate tally might conceivably whittle Bush's lead down by four hundred, or inflate it by five hundred. That's not true, of course: interestingly, this random process can only benefit the Democrats it seems, but no discussion of that subject is permitted. But...over a hundred thousand votes——something more must be behind this seeming madness.

Understanding begins with the concept that any Kerry lead is sacrosanct. No 'activists' will agitate for a recount in Wisconsin, where Long John won by an eyelash. Until this concept is grasped, enlightenment is unattainable. The operative principle here is something like the Brezhnev Doctrine: states won by the Democrat are inviolate—the result is carved in stone. States won by the Republican are negotiable. If the margin is large, righteous zeal will defer, grudgingly, to the limits of human patience. For anything under, say, twenty thousand, the gloves come off and no blow is too low. The playbook calls for pulling out all the stops: every vicious race—baiting canard gets recycled, lawsuits beyond number choke the courts—— let chaos reign, the party of peace and inclusion deserves to win and will not be denied.

The parameters are a little hazy; that figure of twenty thousand is a guess. Purely as an exercise, try to imagine what sort of margin would qualify as incontestable. Bush won Florida by almost four hundred thousand votes and a few bumptious, mathematically inept attempts were made to challenge his victory by fabricating charges of massive vote fraud. These collapsed under the weight of their sheer implausibility: voters in the Panhandle really do register Democratic but vote Republican at a presidential level (something the terribly confused Kathy Dopp could have learned in a single visit to the Florida Division of Elections website); no statistical anomalies can be discovered in the results from the three large South Florida counties (the tendentious Berkeley study—yes, the phrase is redundant—has been demolished on several levels); there isn't a shred of evidence suggesting Republican vote—tampering.

Attention simply had to be switched to Ohio, the more target—rich environment for leftists—in—denial. First, Bush won it by less than Florida. Second, there is nothing second. The ritualized rabble—rousing by Reverend Shakedown, the wild, fantastic charges of electronic vote fraud, the inevitable trotting out of Old Reliable, Republican suppression of minority votes—the choreography needs serious revamping. It's long past time for the Democrats to produce an actual flesh—and—blood human who can say: My name is ___; I live at ___; I attempted to register in the ___ precinct; I couldn't do it, for reasons that are illegal. That, in a nutshell, is what voter suppression would look like. Over a million votes suppressed and nobody can find one credible person to explain how it happened.

Still, there's a weird new element to this hackneyed leftist morality play, a jarring note, something distinctly out—of—whack. Imagine a group of actors rehearsing an English drawing room comedy. They break for lunch and then take a wrong turn, winding up on the set of a jungle movie. There they are, in gowns and tuxedos, under coconut—laden palms, the sounds of native drums throbbing in the background. They gamely decide to play the scene anyway. In her plummiest accent, Lady Ashley remarks on young Freddy's beastly behavior at tea. The sound man punctuates her prattle with screeching birds and chattering monkeys. On and on, the sad, bizarre spectacle staggers until, mercifully, the director screams for someone to get those morons the hell off his set.

The Ohio 'activists' have learned their lines well. But those lines were written for a different election, one within the margin of cheating. Hello? Bush won the state by one hundred twenty thousand votes! Democrat charlatans talk of magically shifting 65,000 votes from Bush to Kerry, without showing any awareness of the real—world mechanism of voting: individuals, one—by—one, go to the polls and vote. That, theoretically, is all there is to it.

Recently, the Washington Post printed a characteristic sample of the New Journalism. A piece containing allegations of suspiciously low turnout in Democratic areas honored the pact between Democrat operatives and reporters to avoid punctiliously any mention of actual numbers. It is permissible to say that voter turnout in Cuyahoga County lagged behind Republican counties. Providing any hard data is taboo. Just for the record, Cuyahoga voted in 2000, 359,913 for Gore to 192,099 for Bush. This year, Kerry received 448,486 votes to Bush's 221,606. Note that Kerry improved on Gore both in absolute numbers and in percentage. Note, too, that the increase in turnout was greater than in the rest of the state. Note, finally, that the Ohio ground games of both parties were in overdrive, but the Democrats did just a bit better: Bush gained 507,518 votes over his performance four years ago; Kerry picked up 553,762. Kerry's gains in the Democratic counties, due primarily to skyrocketing black turnout, outstripped Bush's in the Republican areas. To allege that Republicans suppressed minority voters, in such a context, is either the height of cynicism or sheer insanity. 

You have to get up pretty early to fool one far—left blogger. He has penetrated all of the deceptions of the Bushies: There was widespread hacking, even where no computers were used. And don't tell us that votes weren't suppressed—why did the uncrowded polling places have the biggest turnout?

When Yogi Berra said such things, people weren't so ideologically blinkered that they forgot to laugh.