Would It Help Any If I Told You Jesus Told Me To Stop Counting?

OK, we're used to republicans trying to steal elections from democrats. We mean, after all, when your party is bereft of ideas, full of criminals, pedophiles and nut cases and your most rabid supporters believe the end of the world is just a bombed out Arabic country or two away, it's not like you think of yourselves as mainstream.

But even given that professional grade wingnuttery, we find this odd.

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee challenged the results of his party's weekend caucus in Washington state, where he ran a close second to likely Republican nominee John McCain.

OK, so far not so weird, but wait until you hear the reason Teh Huckster is challenging:

Republican party officials stopped counting with only 87 percent of the vote in. McCain was leading Huckabee by only 242 votes out of approximately 12,000 at the time, with 1,500 votes uncounted, according to the Huckabee campaign.

Now, we're not math majors or anything, but the last time we checked, 1,500 was bigger than 242. Can you explain this Mr. state republican party chair Luke Esser?

“Maybe it would have been safer if I hadn't said anything. But it was an exciting and historic day for the state and I thought if I was confident about what the outcome would be I should share that with the people who had gone out to their caucuses.”

We see. So as a result of your considerable background in predictive statistics, you determined, after careful analysis that at least 1259 of those remaining 1,500 really, really, really liked John McCain?

"Well, actually, I'm a former sports writer and member of the Pro Football Writers of America, who became a lawyer, but I took a stats class at the local community college."

OK, then. We're good with that.

"We're going to demand a full accounting. We're going to see what happened ... It appears that arbitrarily the party chairman just decided that he thought he could see how it was going," Huckabee said.

Well, that's your call governor, but you might want to talk to Al Gore first.