Cynical Nation

For the past 36 hours, my inbox has been flooded with anguished e-mails from social liberals and libertarians, bemoaning the election of "theocracy," and the surrender of civil liberties.

Please, people!

Calm. The Hell. Down.

Listen to me, please. Were there bigots and religious zealots who voted for the president yesterday? Of course. Did they provide the president with an unambiguous popular majority? No fricken way! At the risk of sounding arrogant, that majority is because of me, and people like me, across the political spectrum -- people who prioritized killing terrorists over internal squabbling about stem cells.

Despite attempts by the mainstream media to spin it otherwise, this election was a referendum on the war on terror, plain and simple. Our current situation demands a candidate who is credible as a wartime leader. Kerry, who vacillated over the war so much that he became a caricature, was simply not credible.

I know a lot of people who voted for Bush, and to be honest, most of us did so with strong reservations. We would loved to have had a viable alternative. We were starving for it. Had the ballot contained a Joe Lieberman, or an American Tony Blair, or maybe even a Dick Gephardt, their transition teams would be meeting with the president's today, and Democrats would already be jockeying for cabinet appointments.

Ah well, this is all water under the bridge now, and I suppose it makes no sense to rehash it. It's just that I have all these Democrats who keeping telling me they're so "confused," and they just don't "understand" what happened. I frankly don't see what's so difficult to understand here, but I figured I'd take one final stab at trying to explain it.

In the meantime, please take comfort from this: the swing voters who determined this election most certainly did not endorse religious zealotry or social intolerance. No one is going to try to impose a theocracy upon the United States. Any attempts to do so would be met with firm and immediate opposition by the majority of the American people, including many millions of us who voted for Bush, because we simply felt we had no choice.