CHARLES FOSTER KANE DEFEATED! FRAUD AT POLLS!

Ah, well, better to be beaten than to be robbed. Although there was a lot of robbery going on, at least it was wholesale enough this time not to be contestable. Just ask Boss Jim Gettys. What were we thinking, that we'd be able to take Florida and Ohio with highly partisan Secretaries of State and Governors controlling the electoral machinery? Good grief. It's only going to get worse, in the sense that with a truly shrinking minority of voters, the Reds will be forced to continue what they started in the mid-1990s -- manipulating the US Census and official data and gerrymandering districts to move electoral votes and congressional seats into their column. No, democracy isn't dead, but it sure is taking a royal beating right now. Let's just hope it turns out like Fight Club.

Bush made his attitude of contempt for the losing side manifest at his press conference yesterday, when, refusing to answer a follow-up question from a reporter, he cracked "Didn't you hear the will of the people?" Don't expect anything in the way of truth-telling for the next four years, although it's clear a big portion of the people want to hide under their covers and pretend everything's going to be alright. Speaking of which, our Governor, the Arnoldator, called the Democrats in California a bunch of "losers", even though they didn't lose any seats and remain the majority party in this state. Not coincidentally, there was a letter to the editor in the local paper today, extolling glee at the prospect of running against that hag Hillary Clinton in 2008 and forecasting it as an Arnold-Hillary showdown. Funny, there's the little problem of amending the constitution first to make Arnold eligible. But that thin grasp on reality seems to be par for the course, because discourse has become nothing but name-calling. The resemblance of electoral victors to school yard bullies is astonishing. When one side calls "uncle", claim the whole yard was pulling for you all the time.

I take no joy in this prospect, but it will at least be more difficult in 2008 for the Reds to complain that everything is somebody else's fault. It's bemusing that so much of the Bush cabinet is leaving in a hurry -- rats leaving a sinking ship, etc., or at least eager to get back to their private sector jobs and reap the financial rewards. I doubt there will be a shot at individual accountability, but it will be impossible to escape the wrath of the next generation. The only question is how much damage the morons -- oops, there I go, name-calling -- will do to the country in the meantime.

There's an interesting question to be asked in the historical realm -- Bush has a shot at not having the worst term of a President, but the worst two terms. Maybe US Grant had a worse pair of terms, considering the corruption that ran through his government, but we'll see. All of our other disasters have been one-termers, from Martin van Buren and James Buchanan to Herbert Hoover and Bush I.