Yesterday vanished for me. Like so many others, I’ve been walking around in a daze since I saw Forida called for Bush on Tuesday night. I had a bad feeling at that point, that we’d somehow horribly miscalculated. I still don’t understand how it happened.

• I don’t understand how we missed the significance of correlating these two items: 1) Karl Rove’s claim that he was going to bring 4 million more evangelicals to the polls and 2) the Gay-marriage bans on the ballot in 11 states., a surefire issue to mobilize the “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” crowd.
• I don’t understand how the exit pollsters could have gotten it so wrong. Telephone pollsters have it tough, just trying to get people to talk to them when their phonecall interrupts dinner, but these were people walking out of the poll booths. How did they do such a bad job sampling? Or <conspiracy theory> were the pollsters right and therefore something fishy was going on with the machines?</conspiracy theory>
• I don’t understand how Kerry could have rallied all of us with “No retreat, baby, no surrender,” and then surrendered without every last vote being counted. Being a member of the reality-based community, he could have certainly acknowledged the fact that the numbers seem to indicate that Bush has won, but he didn’t have to give in before Ohio finishes its provisionals in 11 days. Would the country dissolve in a puddle of ooze if he held that call for 11 days?
• I don’t understand how someone can see 51% as a mandate, when damn near half the electorate voted against the president and his policies. The real world is not a winner-take-all game. Half the populations doesnt become disenfranchised on the strength of a minute margin of defeat.
• I don’t understand how some of those who voted the way I did, who felt the way I did, who believed the way I do — how some of them could tell us we have to now support the president in the name of national unity. I submit to the decision of the majority, and I recognize him (this time) as the duly-elected leader of this country, but I didn’t support him, his ideas, his policies and his beliefs before the election, and since then … nothing has changed.
• I don’t understand how half of my countrymen and women could be so alien to me. How can sane, rational adults believe in the contradictory nonsense which spews from this adminstration’s every orifice. How can they reconcile their professed belief in the sanctity of an unborn American child, while taking no issue with the 100,000 Iraqi civilians – mainly women and children — who have died since the beginning of this unnecessary war? How do they reconcile that belief with their belief in capital punishment?

It feels like we’ve crossed a threshhold into a new reality where one group’s twisted perversion of a beautiful religion becomes the standard translation. It’s been building for some time, but the change has been slow and we’ve been so immersed in it that we didn’t notice. It’s like the way Tuesday — Election Day — was a cool and bright fall day here in Maryland, where the air was so clear and crisp that the colors of the changing leaves shone in rainbow hues. On Wednesday, the clouds started moving in, and with the clouds a strong wind which blew the falling foliage into leaf-drifts on the sides of houses. Today, the rain came down all day and the trees are suddenly, obviously bare.