The Democrats are whining that the Taco Bell "poll" is rigged.

Taco Bell announced the first installment of its Taco Poll results yesterday, in which 54 percent of the votes went to Schwarzenegger and his crunchy beef taco, and just three percent of the votes went to Davis and his chicken soft taco. All other candidates received 43 percent of votes through purchases of the chain?s Grilled Stuft Burrito.

Unhappy with the mock poll results, the chairman of the California Democratic Party, former state Sen. Art Torres said yesterday that ?Taco Bell should stick to making tacos, not rigging elections.?

In a press statement released yesterday, Torres said beef tacos always outsell chicken tacos, which cost twice as much at the restaurant chain. In Sacramento, Torres said, Taco Bell sells beef tacos for 74 cents and chicken tacos for $1.50.

It gets harder and harder to parody these clowns. No matter how wacky a thing you come up with, reality always trumps it.

Actually, I think the Democrats are right to be upset about this. I thought the unfairness of this campaign was so obvious that I wrote about it last Friday.

In fact, while I don't know what sort of California campaign finance laws apply to the recall, my guess is that Taco Bell's promotion probably consitutes an illegal political contribution.

(For the record, I believe that virtually ALL campaign finance laws are unconstitutional).

But when you consider how much more expensive it is to have Democrats in charge, maybe the chicken soft taco is underpriced.

<studiously ignoring Bush's spendthrift ways to score a picayune partisan point>

I thought it was funny when I first saw the details, because of course a beef crunchy taco is the best selling item.

At first I thought that the Democrats could just buy up a lot of chicken tacos, but that wouldn't work, because they'd have to use their own money.

Has anybody considered the possibility that Taco Bell chose the more expensive product to represent Bustamante because Bustamante is the more expensive product?