Yawn. It was funny four years ago, when the process was in doubt. This year, there is no serious suggestion of impropriety, and even Greg Palast - whose clinical demolition of the Florida fraud four years ago - has been reduced to making ludicrous assumptions based on grossly flawed predicates.

There are a small minority of people in this country - people who supported Kerry, but mainly people who supported "The Democratic Nominee" (TM) out of brute necessity, whether that candidate had been Howard Dean, John Kerry, or a bag of iceberg lettuce - who are so desparately in hate with Bush and everything that he represents that they'll believe anything - ANYTHING - no matter how far-fetched, rather than believe that Bush won the election. According to Newsweek, the Kerry campaign had a veritable army of over 10,000 lawyers ready to scrutinize every aspect of the election that could be scrutinized, to litigate to infinity....And beyond. We all expected this election to be in the courts for months, for precisely this reason. And yet, when it came down to it, that vast army of lawyers found that the evidence was so conclusive of eletoral fraud that they advised Kerry to concede within 18 hours of the polls closing.

When the dust settled, Bush won the popular vote, won the electoral vote, and increased his share of the vote in virtually every state. His victory was the culmination of a thirty year project begun by Barry Goldwater after Johnson obliterated the Republicans in '64. That project, as Newt Gingrich has correctly identified, vested in four stages: first, with the election of Reagan, secondly with the Contract with America taking back the US House from the Democrats, thirdly with Bush's victory in 2000 and subsequent extension of his margins in the 2002 election, and now finally in 2004, where we saw the beginning of a major political realignment: from a 50/50 nation to a 52/48 nation.

The Democrats and the people who disapprove of the Republican hegemony they now face have got to stop pissing around with this petty nonsense about Bush being a chimp. The establishment of the GOP's hegemony took DECADES. It wasn't an overnight thing, it took decades of work - and until the democrats start to understand what the conservative movement did, and rxactly how they did it, they'll be a fading minority party, just as they were in the last half of the 19th century.

Incidentally, I commend to you all a vrey fine book called "The Right Nation", which is written by a couple of UK journalists (John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. It might help explain a little about practical American politics.