1. The country is getting dumber by the day, evidenced by the choices in hit movies, reality tv shows and the overwhelming majority of drivers I experience daily.

2. The country is scared shitless. 9/11 simply shocked people to the core to the point of irrational behavior and the Republicans played to those fears expertly. Even considering the possibility of a nuclear attack on one of our cities, the odds of any citizen or family being a victim of terrorism in the next decade is smaller than the chance of being hit by a meteorite.

3. Bush had nothing to do with the success of his victory other than taking explicit orders from his team and avoiding news conferences like the plague and being like the NASCAR crowd.

4. The country is being led more by their religious beliefs and intolerance than their own common sense. So many of the people I talked to really floored me by saying they were voting for Bush. When asked why, they had one single issue that drove them such as gay marriage or abortion, both driven by religious tenets rather than Constitutional principles. Nothing else mattered to them even though they felt Bush was rather dumb. Their vote was against Kerry because Bush's team successfully painted him as less religious and moral.

5. Nasty and unsubstantiated attack ads work with the average American. The Republicans showed no remorse in pushing them on us and the Dems had that Achille's Heel of not wanting to be mean. Sad day for America that we're moving back into the concept of Manifest Destiny, that we somehow have been granted some God-given right to break basic ethical behavior because we have the right ideology.

6. In tight times we get greedy. When things get uncertain, a check in the mail from the government at tax time gives us this warm fuzzy even though the economist in us tells us it's probably not worth it to be getting presents when the country is going deeper into debt and we're engaging in foreign wars. The other answer I got from Bush supporters was that economically Bush was better for them or their business personally. Not one of them used the term "better for the country".

I keep looking for ways to let the fact that this is over calm me down but I allowed myself yesterday to yield to my own wishful thinking in the notion that just possibly a light had gone on in the country. I allowed myself to think that people's eyes were actually opening. The election results slammed that notion to bits. Guess we haven't hit rock bottom yet in our latest bout of McCarthyism. Wonder who's going to be the one saying: "Mr. Bush, have you no shame?".