Okay, so like every other left-leaning person in the country over the last few days, I've been bouncing back and forth through the stages of What the fuck just happened?!... one minute ready to end it all, the next convinced that they must have stolen the election because no population could be that stupid, and the next seriously considering some sort of "blue state" secession:

I mean, it seems incomprehensible that our country could be this far down the path of ultra-right-wing warmongering anti-intellectual homophobic one-party-banana-republic insanity, and instead of The People snapping out of it in the knick of time, a slim majority have actually asked for more!

But, here we are. Darth Vader has bent Luke Skywalker over his knee and used the dark side of The Force to ram "moral values" up his ass, and now we have four more years of self-induced destruction to look forward to as the world begins construction of a security "barrier" around us. I guess that's life...

So what to do now?

Of course the media imps (a.k.a "pundits") are trying to convince us that the Democratic party and liberal thought in general is completely out of touch with society and is basically dead. In other words, they're going for the kill. But we did win 48% of the vote, and oh, that's right! They're completely full of shit!

The best thing we can do at this point is to just chill out and get our heads back into the game. Luckily a lot of sharp folks in the blog community are already there, and it helps a lot to see constructive ideas already being kicked around that could move us forward. We just have to start thinking long-term.

And hey, at least we'll get to see Bush deal with his own legacy, rather than watching Kerry get shredded for trying to clean up the mess!