The Democratic Party continues its crusade for victimhood and the further poisoning of the political environment, asking for a recount of the presidential election in Ohio while making wishy-washy allegations of fraud:

The Ohio Democratic Party announced this week that it is supporting a third-party-led effort to force the battleground state to recount its presidential vote.

The organization, whose decision is expected to give more legitimacy to the recount push, complained that Ohio voters faced long lines at the polls Nov. 2, that some voting machines malfunctioned and that some absentee ballots were never delivered.

If that's the basis for their request, then someone needs to explain how recounting the ballots that were cast addresses any of those concerns. It's a further attempt by the Democrats to make Ohio the new Florida, giving them an extension on the martyrdom on which they've based their entire political strategy for the past four years.

Bush won the popular vote in Ohio by 136,000 votes in an election where Republicans turned out in slightly greater percentage than Democrats. With that margin of victory, the odds of any irregularity in the count making even a noticeable dent in Bush's lead approach infinity. And yet here we have the Democrats again, claiming again that an election has been stolen from them, simply because they cannot face the fact that they nominated a lousy candidate who, again, ran a lousy campaign. Their next step will be to file suit to keep Ohio's Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell from certifying the results, a replay of Florida 2000.

If the Democrats think that they can build party support by turning the Buckeye State into the poster child for their victimology, perhaps they should look at their prototype again. They narrowly lost Florida in 2000 (a result confirmed by every recount done after the election), but after four years of holding the Sunshine State up as their Holy Land of martyrdom, they lost it by five points this year and coughed up a critical seat in the Senate. If they want to besmirch Ohio's reputation for the conduct of elections, they may well regret it in 2008. And if they want to turn every election they lose over to the lawyers, the Democrats had better get used to being in the minority for a very long time.

UPDATE: For those who claim, as DSB does in the comments, that the Kerry campaign has nothing to do with this, please try reading the article:

The Kerry campaign said it intends to monitor the proceedings for irregularities. "We didn't ask for it," said Dan Hoffheimer, the campaign's legal counsel. "But since it's apparently going to happen, we want to make sure it gets done right."

Besides, I didn't argue that the Kerry campaign was descending into victimological madness -- I said the Democratic Party was doing so. In fact, until this update, I didn't even mention the Kerry campaign in this post -- but isn't Kerry a Democrat? And if he opposed the recount nuttiness, why is the remnant of his campaign jumping into it?

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