What Went Wrong or, as Mr. Fudd would say, “Waiwing, weeping wiberals!”

Wailing and the gnashing of capped, straightened and whitened teeth is heard throughout the land. Designer clothes are rent in despair. Saks cloth and organic ash are donned in the darkness of despair and a sense of hopelessness seldom, if ever before seen. Thousands of obits for the once-land-of-the-liberals are penned with oceans of ink or posted as rivers of electrons. All is lost. The Barbarians have burst through the gates and are about to pillage and burn the pending Great Society. A hopefully-perfect-social-construct-in-the-works -- that had been so nobly defended and advanced by the lovers of diversity, the seekers of social justice, the defenders of the Butcher of Baghdad, the justifiers of the immolators of New Yorkers and Pentagonians, and those who sympathize with the downtrodden detonators and beheaders of innocents the world over – is on the Eve of Destruction.

And why? George Walker Bush was re-elected President of these United States! Oh, my!

Here's a sample of the post-mortems, ah…post-election analyses by the aforementioned purveyors of punditry –

Peter Beinart, “What Went Wrong?”, New Republic Online –

“Our despair, on the other hand, is undiluted. American liberalism is going into a deep internal exile. This will be, at least with regard to our public institutions, Tom DeLay's America--craven toward the economically powerful and vicious toward the economically weak, contemptuous of open debate and thuggish toward an increasingly embittered world.”

Maureen Dowd, “Rove's Revenge”, New York Times –

“America has always had strains of isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism. But most of our leaders, even our devout presidents, have tried to keep these impulses under control. Not this crew. They don't call to our better angels; they summon our nasty devils.”

John Nichols, “Rove’s Race”, The Nation –

“After every imaginable revelation about the missteps, misdeeds and lies that the Bush administration used to steer the country into the Iraq misadventure, and after all the news about the quagmire it had become, America effectively said to George W. Bush: We trust you to manage the mess more than we trust John Kerry.“

Katrina vanden Heuvel, “Small but Sweet Victories”, The Nation –

“I admit that it's hard in these post-election days to maintain a sense of hope in the face of the grief, anger and outrage over the prospect of a second Bush term. But millions of us spent these last months agitating, organizing, educating and mobilizing with an intensity, cooperation and discipline rarely seen. We're not going away. I don't know about you, but everyone I've spoken with understands that this isn't the time to retreat, that their commitment is needed now more than ever and that we need to build on the energy unleashed and the structures put in place.”


David Corn, “Dark Days Ahead”, The Nation –

“There will be hard and dreadful days ahead for both the Democrats and the nation. The only good news is that the final tally--51 to 48 percent--demonstrates that there remains a great split in America. Praise that divide and prepare for the worst.“

Gaby Wood, “Those New York blues”, The Observer –

“Certainly one of the most salient ironies of this election was the discovery of how selfless most Americans are. In great swathes across the country, people who would have been economically better off under Kerry have selflessly voted for Bush. With Bush in the White House, they might lose their jobs, they might die because they can't afford health insurance, but it's worth it in order to ensure the unhappiness of others: gay people who want to get married, for example, or women who need an abortion.”

Eleanor Clift, “Nader Was Right”, Newsweek –

“Many religious people are upset that moral values are defined so narrowly around reproductive rights and sexual identity when the Bible pays far more attention to issues of poverty. A Blue State Catholic friend says the biggest immorality is that Bush took the country to war on a lie that is costing thousands of lives—American and Iraqi. He half jokes that he will retire in a few years, buy a gas station and sell $80 a barrel oil. Customers who fill up their tank will get a free Bible. ‘Bush’s presidency is like a church revival,’ he says. Maybe so, but if the Democrats want to win elections, they’ll have to figure out a way to fill up the pews.”

Wendy E. Smith, “Can we save country from its leaders?”, Seattle Post-Intelligencer –

“The next caller was a woman from Pennsylvania. She had been busting her butt for Kerry for weeks and was now in despair. She stated that she simply couldn't understand the people who had voted for Bush: "These people want to control what happens in my bedroom, in my body, but they are A-OK with us having killed 100,000 Iraqis, and mounting. I just don't get them."

That was when the bricks hit. I felt lost. I knew what I was planning to do in the case of a stolen election (civil disobedience in the service of saving our democracy). I knew what I was going to do if Kerry won (give him three days to rest and then start pounding on his door with complaints about his Middle East policies). But, I had no idea what to do now.

For months, Kerry has been conspicuously going to church all over the country and shooting ducks and geese like crazy in between -- all in an effort to convince the people in the red states that he "gets them."

It was all in vain. No amount of avian carcasses would have helped.

Half the people in this country believe in a god who forbids stem cell research but seems to have forgotten his own First Commandment.

In the other America, we believe that killing all those Iraqis (not to mention Afghanis and, indirectly, Palestinians) is not only wrong but also terribly hazardous to our own security. We have different "moral values." And we don't give a rat's ass what other people do in their bedrooms.

But we, my friends, are not in the majority.”

Praise the Lord for that!