After being glued to election coverage on CNN and the internet(s) all day, I went to work the night shift at the paper. Our late Tokyo edition goes out at midnight and Ohio was still tied. I got home at 1:30 and turned on the TV and did what any sensible intelligent politically-aware individual anywhere in the world does the night of a U.S. presidential election -- I drank a half a bottle of irish whisky before the ice cubes could melt and muttered obscenities to myself while I watched the good guys concede "for the good of the country" so that the "healing could begin." Then I went to bed and tried not to cry myself to sleep.

Please tell me the fix was in
Tell me it was the Diebold machines, tell me it was missing absentee ballots in Florida, tell it was voter intimidation and disenfranchisement, tell me it was little green men from the planet Zorgo using a mind control ray. Tell me the election was rigged, because the alternative is just too depressing to contemplate.

The U.S. presidential election saw a record turnout of about 60 percent of eligible voters, nearly 115 million. This means that unless the polls were rigged, 59 million Americans are stunningly ignorant, easily-led, bloodthirsty reactionaries who believe God talks to George W. Bush.

This means that fear, superstition, knee-jerk flag waving, intolerence and blind faith trump reason, science and egalitarianism in public discourse and politics in America.

I'm a Canadian that lives in Tokyo. For me the Bush presidency has been like have a belligerent drunken hillbilly for a next door neighbor. He sits on the porch in his undershirt, spitting tobacco juice on your driveway while he cleans his gun collection and lets his pack of hounds dump on your lawn. The whole neighbourhood hates and fears him.
After four years of this a "for sale" sign goes up next door and you're overjoyed. A few weeks later, a guy comes to your door and says he's thinking seriously of buying the hillbilly's house. You chat and he seems like a decent, reasonable person. You begin to hope. Then a few days later, with a "yeehaw" the hillbilly sets fire to the sign and tells you he's decided to stay after all and proceed to tell you that you better take that durn fence down and move it closer to your house before he gets mad.