Election jitters

I haven't been this nervous for a long time, even when I was on the ballot. I came home from work early when the power went out at 4:30 p.m. MST and hadn't come back on 20 minutes later. I started my laptop to see if there was any news on the internet, but found that Instapundit, Power Line, and Captain's Quarters wouldn't come up. A few minutes later, the power came back on, and I turned on Fox and found Brit's "All-Stars" talking about the vote as if Bush had lost. Sinking feeling. Finally got RCP to open, and found that it was predicting just under 300 electoral votes for Bush. As I finally got some blogs to download, the picture looked better.

There have been some pretty bitter columns, from E. J. Dionne and Richard Cohen. The Bush-hate is still spewing. Perhaps these morons also have that sinking feeling.

There have been some calls for pledge taking like this one from Dean Esmay:

[Whoever wins,] I will refuse to call him traitor, loser, liar, incompetent. He will be my President, my Commander In Chief, the Chief Executive of a great nation, elected by the will of a majority of the electors in these 50 great united States. So even if he does things I disagree with in conducting foreign policy, I will say, "I respectfully disagree with the President's directions, but I will do my best to express my dissent respectfully and hope that I am mistaken and that he has made the proper decisions after all."

Or this one from Jeff Jarvis:

After the election results are in, I promise to:
: Support the President, even if I didn't vote for him.
: Criticize the President, even if I did vote for him.
: Uphold standards of civilized discourse in blogs and in media while pushing both to be better.
: Unite as a nation, putting country over party, even as we work together to make America better.

Fine, if Democrats and other liberals have realized that they have been acting and talking like barking moonbats since 2000, I welcome them back to civil discourse. I don't feel any shame for what I have said or written about Kerry. He is a boring, arrogant jerk. I didn't say he was a traitor, a moron, a Marxist, a deserter, a cokehead, a murderer, or any of the other things that people on the left have been saying about Bush. I do think that his anti-war activities upon his return home were cynical and intemperate and caused harm to this country generally and to his fellow veterans and POWs being held by the North Vietnamese specifically. I'm willing to let others decide whether such a person deserves to be called a patriot.

The Swiftboat Vets are entitled to their opinions, having seen Kerry in action during his heroic third of a year in Vietnam, they were in a better position than I to judge. Should they take these pledges? Only if they are willing to admit being hypocrites.

If I have to promise anything, I'm more inclined to take the Spoons pledge. If Kerry gets elected, it will have been with the substantial and monetarily valuable support of the mainstream media. I will never forgive them. They are in my mind Elsworth Tooheys, as greedy for power as they claim Bush and Cheney are for oil. They are the Pharisees of our time, whited sepulchres, hypocrites, arrogant and dishonest. They promoted campaign finance reform, all the while knowing that the only way to overcome the tidal wave of disinformation they were purveying would be to buy air time. If the FEC were to charge them with donating illegally to the Democrats through in-kind contributions of PR, they'd squeal like stuck pigs about their First Amendment Rights. They'd be right, but they'd never admit that their own bias is what makes such "reform" more of a trick bag than real reform. The only way to redress this problem if for the owners of these enterprises to imitate Roger Ailes by serving the markets for news that they have ignored.