As we wait for CBS to concede the election, Democrats are claiming Kerry lost because Americans are stupid ? and if there's one thing voters respond to, it's crude insults.

This is not only the first step of a brilliant strategy to win the red states back, but also inconsistent with the Democrats' theory that Bush was an illegitimate president for the last four years because Democratic voters in Florida were too dumb to follow an arrow to the circle by Al Gore's name. How stupid were the alleged Gore-supporters who couldn't figure out how to cast a vote in the 2000 election?

Using classical Marxist thinking, liberals can't fathom how issues like abortion and gay marriage could trump ordinary people's economic interests -? which liberals axiomatically assume are furthered by the Democrats' offers of government assistance. Democrats are saying to voters: How can you be so stupid to subordinate your own selfish economic interests to "moral values," the betterment of the country and the general welfare of people you don't even know?

It can only be false consciousness. If liberals think the Bush vote was composed of illiterate homophobes who fear women in the workplace, perhaps the Democrats should start demanding literacy tests to vote.

Garry Wills ? who fills in "occupation" on his federal tax return with "self-hating Catholic" ? denounced America in the New York Times as an unenlightened nation full of people who believe "more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution."

By contrast, apparently, "enlightened" people believe in the Aborted Birth more fervently than they believe in national defense. And just in the interest of fairness here, Garry: At least there's some documentation on the Virgin Birth story. For people who believe so fervently in evolution, these Bush mandate-deniers sure are resistant to it on a personal level.

On the same day, on the same nuanced Times editorial page, both Wills and Maureen Dowd wrote that Kerry was defeated by a "jihad" of Christians. The jihadists, according to Wills, were driven by "fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity." Dowd said they were "a devoted flock of evangelicals, or 'values voters,' as they call themselves ... opposing abortion, suffocating stem-cell research and supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage." Finally ? a jihad liberals oppose!

Speaking of gay marriage, as long as liberals are so big on discussing "mandates" and whether Bush has one (they say he does not), I think the one thing we can all agree on is that there is definitely a "mandate" against gay marriage. In fact, a clear majority of us are uncomfortable with the word "mandate" because it sounds like Wayne asking Stephen out for dinner and a movie.

Reacting to Bush's re-election in that calm, reasoned way we have come to expect of liberals, they are running to psychotherapists, threatening to move to Canada and warning of a fascist police state ? including their fear of a Hollywood "blacklist." (Now you understand how the myth of McCarthyism began, red states!)

One depressed Kerry voter committed suicide at Ground Zero. Meanwhile, the entire Democratic Party is also contemplating political suicide by making Howard Dean its next chairman. Continued...