I've noticed recently that there's much written, in publications and in blogs, of the sort I used to consume voraciously, but lately has been leaving me cold.

During the Presidential campaign, folks were fervently supporting their respective candidates, and hyperbole, exaggeration and the occasional outright lie was to be expected. But I have to say to my friends on both the Left and the Right, the campaign's over. It's done. Your guy won or lost, as the case may be, and we have the leadership here in the U.S. that we're going to have for the next four years, and the populace is still split pretty much right down the middle.

To my Liberal friends, I wouldn't presume to tell you to be happy about the result of the election, or that you should just accept everything that the Bush Administration comes up with as a fait accompli. I don't consider the November results to be a mandate for the President or the Republican party. Unlike you guys, though, I think folks ignore recent trends at their own political peril. You guys lost. You lost the Presidential election, you lost seats in the House, and you lost seats in the Senate. In that situation, it would seem unwise to try to solidify your most radical positions and abandon those that may be attractive to some of those in the middle who voted for the other side. I don't think I've ever expressed it on the Internet, but for a long time I've considered Senator Edward Kennedy to be a buffoon, a stereotypically unprincipled career politician, an embarrassment to the Democratic Party, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the United States. I won't go into John Kerry other than to say that his recent performance on the Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmation hearings for Dr Rice only strengthened my poor opinion of him. And Senator Barbara Boxer? It appears to me that she would do anything, anything, to hurt her opponents, and damn the consequences. These are not the kind of people that are going to lead the Democratic Party out of its current slump.

And for my Conservative friends, get over yourselves. President Bush won by less than three percent. That's right. There was a 2.8% difference in the popular vote totals for the President and Senator Kerry. That, my friends, doesn't give you carte blanche to run roughshod over the Democrats. That thin margin of victory doesn't give you license to tell each and every Liberal that they should sit down, shut up, and just watch The Great Conservative Machine drive the country around in right turns. I've seen some of you become so self-righteous, self-assured, everything-I-say-is-always-right-and-if-you-disagree-you're-a-stupid-Neanderthal-idiot since November, I can hardly bear to read anything you write. Think before you write some of that crap. You see, that's the advantage of a written medium: you have a chance to go back, reread, rethink, edit, SPELLCHECK, and generally edit what you drafted. Some of you folks, who already had something approaching a Perfection Complex, have become insufferable in your arrogance. Keep it up, numbskulls, and come November 5, 2008, your heads will be spinning, wondering where all your power and influence went. I say again, get over yourselves.

Maybe some of you guys on the Left and Right want to live in enclaves where everyone thinks alike. Maybe you think that all the guys on the other side are mindless shills who wait breathlessly for instructions from King Karl Rove, or unprincipled thieves who want nothing more than to steal all your money and distribute it among their fellow travelers. If any of that hits anywhere close to you, you need to recognize that you're hanging out on the fringes. And until that happens, you'll continue to distance yourselves from the mainstream of society. Take off your blinders, dude.

So I say, let's enjoy the next couple of years before the 2008 Presidential campaign starts. Feel free to disagree with proposals from the other side. Point out the holes, and offer alternatives. All that is great. But this knee-jerk, automatic, don't-think-about-it-before-you-respond approach is just — annoying. And boring.

Live your lives, people. There's more to it than politics.