By Denis Campbell

It was a great election (duh-dum) wasn’t it? A new Democratic President (duh-dum), bigger majorities in the House and Senate (duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh… duhdadeeee) and nothing can go wrong… AEEIIIIIII!!!!! Apologies to John Williams, Peter Benchley and the cast of Jaws, what the heck is going on in the Senate?!?

OK, it was cute that both Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow were able to replay the NBC Decision ’08 theme song and graphics but things are getting out of hand. We’re truly becoming a banana republic with nukes. We’re going to need UN inspectors sent to Alaska, Minnesota and Georgia as well as peace-keeping forces at this rate.

Aaah Alaska, the state that brought us the fun of Caribou Barbie aka Sarah Palin and now has a convicted felon for a Senator embroiled in an election which still has some 90,000 votes to count. Yesterday was a bad day for federal convict Ted Stevens as he saw a 3,000 vote lead disappear during the ballot count of about 40,000 of the 90,000 ballots in question. Indeed after counting some 250,000 ballots, he now trails by (wait for it)… (it’s really good!)… 3 VOTES!

Caribou Barbie has said she would love to fill the Senator’s seat if he wins (because the Senate will expel him as a convicted felon) now that’s loyalty you can count on. The real question is why an 84-year old felon even won this election? Then there are other “irregularities” such as how could voter turnout actually go DOWN in a state where the sitting governor is on the ballot as a Vice Presidential candidate? Too, how could über statistician, fivethirtyeight.com’s Nate Silver get the final vote count correct in 49 other state with 4/10ths of a percentage point error factor, besting all other comers by a more than two full percentage points and miss the Alaskan count by 20?!? (He was so right throughout every other campaign it was like Babe Ruth pointing and saying he would hit the ball to for a home run into bleacher section B, Row 12, Seat 3 and it actually ended up in Row 14, seat 9 of a 45,000 seat stadium.

And then there’s Minnesota, Garrison Keillor’s state and home to the fictitious Lake Woebegone (where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above average). The Senate vote difference has dropped all week and R-Norm Coleman (the incumbent) leads by 200 votes. He demanded earlier that D-Al Franken concede and forego the mandatory recount under Minnesota law. So the commentariat asked if the lead should change in the coming days would Coleman then concede?

Both sides are lawyering up with the Republicans despatching 120 lawyers to recount sites across the state. Our finest hour got even worse when the Republican Party called the MN Secretary of State (who has jurisdiction over the recount a “socialist,” or was it communist?) Anyways, you get the drift of where this is headed.

And finally off to the great state of Georgia where that scion of political decency Saxby Chambliss, incumbent Republican Senator, started a new campaign exactly where he left off six years ago. Chambliss, you may remember, ran against incumbent D-Max Cleland. Cleland is a war hero who left three limbs on the battlefield in Vietnam and served his country and state with distinction. Back in the time when Karl Rove’s smear jobs worked to perfection, Chambliss ran adverts equating Cleland with Osama bin Laden and showing pictures of 9-11 along with the GOP mantra of fear, fear, fear…. Guess what resurfaced this week in the run-up to the run-off election on 02 December? Yup, opponent Jim Martin in adverts with 9-11 and Osama bin Laden.

While the rest of us are filled with hope for the future, there are still parts of the gene pool in need of chlorination. Clean up these three please!