How’s your Friday going? Even if it’s been a little disappointing so far, you may rest assured you’re having a better day than union bosses, liberal bloggers, Michael Moore, JoAnne Kloppenburg… and most especially Kathy Nickolaus, the clerk of Waukesha County.
In a press conference last night, the Clerk Of Nevermind had to admit she “failed to save on her computer and then report 14,315 votes in the city of Brookfield, omitting them entirely in an unofficial total she released after Tuesday’s election,” according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. This put incumbent Republican Justice David Prosser ahead by about 7500 votes.
Of course, the dementors of the liberal blogosphere have deleted all their triumphant “Scott Walker Is Toast” posts and replaced them with furiously scribbled conspiracy theories about Nickolaus being some kind of vote-manufacturing tool of the Koch Brothers. They won’t be troubled by the validation of Democrat canvasser Ramona Kitzinger, who said, “We went over everything and made sure all of the numbers jibed up and they did. Those numbers jibed up, and we’re satisfied they’re correct.”
You can measure the futility of this far-left rage by noting how little mainstream media interest they’ve been able to work up for their theories. Not every frantic email from MoveOn.org instantly becomes a major media story. The best thing we can do for the Daily Kos crowd is leave them alone to cry themselves to sleep. For my part, I now have the word “jibed” stuck in my head, and will use it at every opportunity until my friends make me stop.
Nickolaus apparently has some history of human error when it comes to managing vote databases. She quickly and forthrightly owned up to her cataclysmic mistake in this case. Is this all her fault, or does Wisconsin expect too much by forcing her to grapple with a primitive voting system that provides plenty of opportunities for fraud – especially in an era when instant vote tallies are expected by a public hungry for information, and a media eager to feed them?
As Nickolaus pointed out, the canvassers discovered her error, and there was little risk of those votes going permanently uncounted. How long ago would it have been considered entirely reasonable to wait two days for the final results of a hotly contested, close election? Of course, we know we can do better than that with modern technology, and don’t want to settle for horse-and-buggy vote tallying. Can we count on Democrat support for a rational system of voter registration and identification now? Because they usually fight to the death against that sort of thing.
Speaking of the Daily Kos, just yesterday they were saying that “JoAnne Kloppenburg is ahead by a fairly comfortable margin of just over 200 votes,” so David Prosser shouldn’t request a recount unless he’s “willing to pay for the recount himself,” because they’re “not mandatory in Wisconsin under any circumstance.” Conceding the race immediately would “show everyone he cares about wasting taxpayer money.” I assume this logic still holds now that Prosser is up by a far more comfortable margin of 7500 votes, and the Angry Left will vigorously oppose any Kloppenburg demands for a recount.
One angry leftist who didn’t take last night’s developments well was union-busting millionaire Michael Moore, who said on Twitter that Republicans were acting like “sore losers” for counting the new votes because “Kloppenburg has already declared victory.” He actually called on the Obama Justice Department to “impound the ballots and stop the shenanigans.” Every time I mention anything Moore says, I get heat for bringing him up, because only deeply stupid people take him seriously. Well, there are a lot of deeply stupid people in this country, and the only way to snap them out of their intellectual nose dive is to force them to confront the reality of the man who sat beside a former President at the 2004 Democrat convention.
Moving into the more respectable corners of punditry, a lot of people on both Left and Right made serious attempts to examine the significance of what looked like a razor-thin Kloppenburg win. They were working with the best information available at the time, and trying to make sense of it. Some thoughtful analysis was invalidated by the events of last night. I don’t see any reason to hold that against writers who reached incorrect conclusions while working under pressure with inaccurate data… but it will be important to see if they follow consistent logic in divining the results of a 7500-vote win for Prosser.
David Prosser was the big winner last night, in more ways than one. Watch this report from Greta Van Susteren’s show, courtesy of Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit, and compare Prosser’s grace and humility with Kloppenburg’s hasty dash to declare victory yesterday. This battle in the War on Taxpayers is over, and the taxpayers won.
