Anybody else feel like a ten-ton weight has been lifted from his shoulders? Anybody else feel like every muscle had been tensed and clenched for about two months, and a steadily increasing vice-like pressure had been squeezing him, day by day, as the election approached? Just me? Boy, since that last debate, I just wanted the race to end. Just vote and get it over with.

The only thing at stake in this election was the future of Western Civilization. In seemingly every conceivable way, John Kerry was the wrong man to lead this nation in the war we're in right now. His 1971 testimony, his defense-cutting record, his obsession with a "global test," his disturbing pride in the endorsements from unnamed foreign leaders, his naïve belief that the leaders of France and Germany are concerned with American security, his contradictory statements, suggesting he didn't grasp the stakes in Iraq...

... and that damnable Monday Morning Quarterbacking that he dared call a vision! All he ever had to say about the war on terror was that Bush had messed up, and that he would fix it with a plan (details to come at a later date). Serious mainstream media would have demanded those details, and laughed him off the stage when he refused to divulge them.

Bill Maher had it right when he called Kerry a Frankenstein's monster of the worst Democratic candidates in recent memory: the I-know-better-than-you arrogance of Al Gore; the toxic inability to relate to human beings of Michael Dukakis; the dippy never-lost-faith-in-liberalism outlook of Walter Mondale. And, one might add, the decisiveness of Bill Clinton.

(When the networks' anti-Bush propaganda — er, I mean the "exit polls" — broke, I readied myself for a Bush defeat. I thoroughly believed Kerry was the wrong guy for this era, and that his ill-considered policies meant Americans would die over the next four years.