Certainty

Howdy Stifled Minds. This is Dean, your friendly neighborhood Dirty Fucking Hippy. I hate that my introduction to the site is a peice on something as intrinsicly shady and underhanded as internal Republican election events, but this just had to be written.

SO on Feb 9th, this past Saturday, the slimy masses came together in the state of Washington to light their smoky fires, chant their incantations and cast the bone dice to determine whether the next Republican standard bearer would be the Being of Infinite War, or the Being of Infinite Intolerance.

Ok, so did I mention I leaned a little to the left?

But seriously, so the Republican voters turned out in Washinton to vote on their nomine of choice. Nothing out of the ordinary. Percentages were being tallies, votes counted, the usual election ferver infecting campaigns and participants alike. At 11:30 pm, with 87% of precincts reporting, it looked to be a close race. Less than 300 votes seperated John McCain and Mike Huckabee, thats less than 2% of the total votes in the contest. A nail-biter for sure.

Then the bomb hit. State Republican Chairman Luke Esser declared John McCain the winner. Apparently, Esser had some of that BushCo. "secret math" working away and had determined that there was no way Huckabee could win. Mike was obviously surprised, pointing at the 13% of votes still to be counted, and the slim margin between himself and McCain. Now, this could be easily explained by an overzealous or poorly informed party chairperson, and a simple, "Oops, my bad, keep counting." on the part of Esser would have set things aright. But lets be honest, this is the Republican Party, and accountability has never really been in fashion for these folks.

So he attempts to explain his decision to call the primary without counting all the votes. “There's no certainty in this mortal coil. But I am confident these numbers will hold up.”

As if to say Hey, these things happen! There's no way to tell with these "vote" things, so I just made the call that felt right.

I have some news for Washington State Republican Party Chairperson Luke Esser, there is a great deal of certainty in this mortal coil, this reality that the rest of the world lives in. That certainty is call "votes." The idea, if I understand it correctly, is that whoever has the most votes, wins. Now, I know that Republicans are not huge fans of this idea (See Bush v Gore, 2004), but there is a great deal of precedent for this idea going back to, say, Athens, Greece. So if Esser would like to make a career out of "gut feelings," talk to DHS Chairman Michael Chertoff, I'm sure his gut could use some assistance (Subscription only).

But for the rest of the country, those of us who care about reality and the will of the voters, how about we count those ballots, and then decide who won, huh?

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