Woke up this mornin', got the election blues

I'm no fan of George Bush. I hate the war in Iraq (although it has ended the sanctions - nobody seemed nearly so concerned at the previous decade of misery heaped on the Iraqis). I have his illiberal views. I'm all for gay marriage, abortion rights and stem cell research. But there was nothing worth celebrating in John Kerry's platform. And I must confess to a degree of schadenfreude watching British liberals suffering.

If you're anti-militarism, why would you support a soldier for president?

If Bush is anti-science, so are many of Kerry's supporters who support Kyoto and environmentalist action even though it is backward-looking and anti-progress.

If Bush is so terrible, why would you support Kerry who had little distinctive to say?

We've heard so many complaints about the lack of democracy in America - but calling Bush a moron is no substitute for political argument, and calling his supporters morons is as anti-democratic as anything Bush has done. 'Let the people decide - as long as they choose correctly' seems to be the argument.

Having said this, here are some classic over-the-top, emotional statements after Bush's victory.

Dismally, people asked each other how long they had stayed up the night before. "Until 4.30am," said my friend Jim. "Long enough to start crying like a girl."

A friend in New York wrote: "The one consolation that people are clinging to is that he will fuck things up so badly in the next four years that the Democrats will move back into favour. That's if we still have a world." People in the city, he said, were wondering, "How we are going to survive the next four years. Unbelievable."

If we still have a world? If we survive? Some historical perspective, please!

"Ach," says Oliver James, the clinical psychologist. "I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s and thought, 'Why doesn't anyone see where this is leading?'"

That's the trouble with liberals - just about everything is going to end the world: driving cars, killer bugs, right-wing presidents... Get over yourselves!

What we need is some hard-nosed politics to defend rationality, equality and freedom, not a bunch of therapy cases.

Guardian Unlimited | US elections 2004 | Woke up this mornin', got the election blues