Finally, Democrats have a battle plan. This month, they went to war -- on the American electoral process. Their pre-emption strategy? Call into question the results of the midterms even before Election Day had begun.

Brigadier General Nancy Pelosi of the 8th Drapery Division led the charge in an interview with her hometown San Francisco Chronicle last week:

Pelosi cautioned that the number of Democratic House victories could be higher or lower and said her greatest concern is over the integrity of the count -- from the reliability of electronic voting machines to her worries that Republicans will try to manipulate the outcome. "That is the only variable in this," Pelosi said. "Will we have an honest count?"

The "only variable"? How about the variable of voters making up their own minds?

Two days before the election, left-wing Boston Globe columnist Robert Kuttner also advanced the Democrat strategy of pre-emptive delegitimization -- which Boston radio talker Michael Graham rightly characterized as "Either We Win Or You Cheated."

Wrote Kuttner: "[U]nless there are levels of theft and fraud that would truly mean the end of American democracy, a Democratic House seems as close to a sure thing as we ever get in American politics three days before an election. . . . November 2006 will be remembered either as the time American democracy was stolen again, maybe forever, or began a brighter day."

Meanwhile, a gaggle of left-wing lawyers and college students mobilized at the polls to "protect" the integrity of the voting process. Behind the civic-minded facade of these groups, including the Election Protection Coalition and Video the Vote, are far-left radicals whose main concern is not in ensuring a fair election process -- but in pre-emptively undermining and delegitimizing it.

Video The Vote is led by anti-Bush documentarians who champion Cynthia McKinney's race-card politics and tinfoil hat conspiracies about 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. The supposedly "bipartisan" poll watchers are supported by Norman Lear's People For the American Way and MTV. Allied with this coalition are the likes of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) -- the liberal advocacy group that has turned the minority voter registration business into a government boondoggle and corrupted the very process it claims to guard. Last week a federal grand jury in Kansas City indicted four ACORN workers in an illegal scheme to register voters with 15,000 fraudulent forms using bogus names, signatures and addresses.

What did the Democrats have to say about the ACORN indictments and other ACORN fraud probes stretching from Wisconsin and Colorado to Ohio, Tennessee and Pennsylvania?

Nada.

The "stolen election" virus and Democrat blind spot on liberal voting fraud have afflicted the Left since 2000. Leading up to the 2004 election, Jesse Jackson played the pre-emption card: "The big issue in Florida is not whether we vote, the big issue is vote suppression." Failed Democrat vice presidential candidate John Edwards echoed the warning: Republicans were "up to their old tricks . . . trying to keep people from voting."

And last April, failed Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry's wife, Teresa, blamed the Democrats' loss in 2004 on rigged Diebold voting machines. She openly questioned the election results and fixated on areas of the country where optical scanners were used to record votes. "Two brothers own 80 percent of the machines used in the United States," Mrs. Heinz Kerry intoned, and it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."

Asked for evidence of her "mother machine"-hacking theory, the ketchup heiress refused further comment. But a cacophony of conspiracy theorists and mainstream Democrats have since taken up Kerry's moonbat baton, from Truther types to Black Box paranoiacs to Hillary Clinton.

Never mind the glaring contradiction of their attack on a Bush administration too incompetent to govern, yet so nefariously efficient and devious that it can rig hundreds of thousands of voting machines to deny the Democrats their "honest count" and entitled victory.

When all is said and done this week, one thing will be resoundingly clear: The Dems' election pre-emption plan -- like all their plans -- is a phony vehicle to sow seeds of doubt, paranoia and chaos as substitutes for action.