You lost; get over it!

Dear Sean H, Bill O, Alex J, Bill B, Newt G, Michelle M, Glenn B, Michael S (both of you), Mark L, Laura I, Lou D, Rush L, Ann C, et al.,

I'm not sure if you recall this, but there was a democratically held, presidential election back in November, 2008. We hold one of these election thingies every four years, and we have been for over a couple-hundred years now.

As usual, two people ran, and one of them lost. There was no legal wrangling this time like there was in 2000 when your guy lost, then won with a boost from The Supremes. This time, things went smoothly, voters spoke loudly, no chads dangled, no one shouted, no lawyers wrangled: this time, Barack Obama won, fair and square.

Look, I'm sorry your guy in 2008 was, in your eyes, a poor candidate. I'm sorry he was joined at the lips with Bush 43. I'm sorry he chose as his VP running mate a governor who dragged down his own ticket and who diminished his own message even as she promoted her own. I'm sorry your guy vacillated more than a sofa shopper on a tight budget and blew in the wind more than the 18th pin at Pebble Beach. I'm sorry the distorted negative campaign he ran -- behind which some of you stood and from which most of you ran -- didn't work out for him or for you. I'm sorry for Joe the Plumber simply for him. I'm sorry you confuse "fair and balanced" with "fear and unbalanced." I'm sorry you seem to feel you always need to resort to anger and hatred and vitriol as forms of argument. And I'm sorry your Republican Party is in such a sorry state.

I'm sorry about all of this, but please, stop fomenting fear and confusion by loudly proclaiming tyranny, fascism, and communism, and tacitly supporting racism, jingoism, and all manner of equally insidious hideous-isms.

All of this stuff is way beneath even all of you. Please. Just stop it.

What you're doing is conflating (A) your obvious annoyance and frustration, with (B) having obviously lost an election. That's what this is about. You're neither, as you claim to be, big-C Conservatives nor little-c conservatives on a mission to save the country. You don't really care about the country; you just care about the part of it that agrees with you, the part that buys your books, the part that buys your advertisers' products, the part that buys into the viciously skewed, barking-mad mayhem you're making.

True, enormous-C conservatives -- like Goldwater, Reagan, and Buckley -- are on spin-cycle in their graves with every mean remark you make and with every claim you lay on their legacy. All you've become, all you are, are bitter radical nationalists oozing your unctuous agenda over the free airwaves granted to you by the same schmucks you claim to care about.

OK. You don't like President Obama. So be it. Everyone gets this. But you need to get that it took your guy eight years to drive us into the poorhouse and destroy our reputation in the world in which we all have to live; why not give the new guy more than eight weeks to fix things?

What you all need to do is what so many others did after the 2000 election: you need to get over it and get on with exercising your right as voters in the United States of America by fairly winning back the White House in 2012.

Until then, please... stop being so mean-spirited and so hateful; stop being such poor losers; and start trying to win the next one, fairly and squarely. That's "the American way," but you already know that, don't you.