Dennis who?

If Bill Richardson’s hefty resume indicates he’s leaving the Democratic presidential race too soon (see “Bill who?” below), surely his colleague Dennis Kucinich’s candidacy has worn out its hanging chad-thin welcome. After winning less than 2 percent of the vote in New Hampshire this week, Kucinich called for a recount. That’s right. A recount – just to make sure that “100 percent of the voters had 100 percent of their votes counted.” How nice of him.

Cleveland’s former “boy mayor” seems to be alleging that dark forces favoring Hillary Clinton – maybe in some some weird, wacko triangulation scheme involving those right-wing voting-machine manufacturers, who knows? – conspired to steal the victory from Barack Obama. Kucinich’s “serious and credible” evidence? Reports on the Internet (it’s online, so it must be true, right?) claiming that hand-counted ballots favored Obama, while machine-counted ones favored Clinton.

Somehow, it’s not surprising that UFO believer Kucinich is also a card-carrying member of the tinfoil-hat brigade of election conspiracy theorists. But New Hampshire’s deputy secretary of state, David Scanlan, pointed out that the state’s voting machines aren’t linked, so any widespread manipulation of results is near-impossible, no matter how desperately the ballot-box paranoids wish to believe otherwise. And paper ballots – the Holy Grail of the electile dysfunction crowd – are there to back it up.

Whew. Another Ohio congressman (now living out of state) used to punctuate his floor speeches with the phrase, “Beam me up.” Kucinich probably doesn’t say that because he’s afraid he’d get his wish.