Free Republic

WASHINGTON — Some of my colleagues in the pundit business have become unhinged by the election results. The always diverting Maureen Dowd of The New York Times wrote the other day that "the forces of darkness" are taking over the country. The voters' confirmation of Republican-led government brings with it "a scary, paranoid, regressive reality," Dowd said, with "strains of isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism." After a campaign of "blatant distortions and character assassination," Republicans have returned to Washington bent on "messing with our psyches" and punishing "society's most vulnerable: the poor, the sick, the sexually different."

This, too, shall pass. The United States will muddle through, as it's muddled through before, because the idea of America, and the system that sustains it, is bigger and braver and more enduring than any single subpar president or collective brain cramp of the populace. But it's so damn sad anyway. Once again, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, the only thing to fear was fear itself, only this time fear won. Bombast won, the Big Lie won. And of course George W. Bush won, with his staunch certainties in a scary world and his skilled retailing of "moral values" to...