HEY OLSON, HOW'S THAT VOTE COUNT IN WASHINGTON STATE GOING?

I don't want to beat this into the ground, but right now Republicans are having a jolly old schadenfreudegasm over an ugly Democratic legal battle that hasn't even happened, and may never happen, while, in their own party, actual lawyers are actually looking into the actual vote-counting irregularity in Washington State, a subject much of the GOP seems not to want to talk about.

The inspiration for the schadenfeude among GOP unhatched-chicken counters is this snarky Wall Street Journal op-ed by GOP uber-apparatchik Ted Olson, almost all of which is written in conditional tenses:

What splendid theater the Democratic Party presidential nominating process is shaping up to be. And they are just getting started. The real fun would be a convention deadlock denouement a few months from now....

How ironic.... [Democrats] have designed a Rube Goldberg nominating process that could easily produce a result much like the Electoral College result in 2000....

Imagine that as the convention approaches, Sen. Clinton is leading in the popular vote, but Sen. Obama has the delegate lead. Surely no one familiar with her history would doubt that her take-no-prisoners campaign team would do whatever it took to capture the nomination, including all manner of challenges to Obama delegates and tidal waves of litigation.

...As the convention nears, with Sen. Clinton trailing slightly in the delegate count, the next step might well be a suit in the Florida courts....

No lawyers are in place, no lawsuits are in the works, yet Democrats are already guilty of excessive litigiousness because Ted Olson thinks lawsuits would happen. It's a wrinkle on the Clinton Rules (soon, perhaps, to be the Obama Rules): Not only is what other people do without raising objections suddenly evil when the Clintons do it, it's evil when it's believed they might do it.

Meanwhile, in actually existing reality in Washington State:

... Huckabee's campaign said there were "obvious irregularities" in the state's Republican caucuses and that it is sending lawyers to explore "all available legal options regarding the dubious final results." ...

I'm reminded of Stephen Colbert's take on the Bush administration's attitude toward torture:

... we shouldn't be judged on actions. It's our principles that matter; our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember, Jon, just because torturing prisoners is something we did doesn’t mean it's something we would do.