It’s been a while now since the election took place, but it’s still not easy for me to come to grips with it. Strangely enough, I slept okay the night I learned that Barack Obama had defeated John McCain. It was only when I awoke and realized that Sen. Obama would soon be President Obama that the nightmare began. I truly felt overcome with grief, the kind you feel when a loved one dies. In this case, the loved one was America.

I have been listening to conservative commentators on radio trying to put a good face on it. At times, they’ve sounded like they’re angling for the same White House dinner invitations they got from George Bush. But perhaps they’re just hoping if they do enough kissing up, they can somehow dissuade the Democrats from passing the misnamed Fairness Doctrine. I think they might as well expect that Al Gore and Robert Kennedy, Jr., will acknowledge that global warming has been a gargantuan hoax.

Liberals, after all, never admit their mistakes, never take responsibility for, say, destroying public education or taking an axe to the black family structure. But, then, liberals never take responsibility for anything. If they did, they’d be conservatives.

I know that a lot of Republicans are busy playing the blame game. Some, myself included, are pointing fingers at John McCain for running the lamest presidential campaign in memory. Others, not I, are pointing at Sarah Palin, while a few are singling out Mike Huckabee, suggesting that if he had dropped out when he should have, Mitt Romney would have won the primaries, thus preventing McCain from getting to do his dead-on impression of Michael Dukakis.

Some people simply blame the economy for Obama’s victory. They may be right, but I’d prefer not to believe that a sizable number of Americans think that electing a Socialist is a really clever way to solve a financial crisis.

Many of my friends and colleagues are already looking to 2012, vowing to learn from the mistakes of this campaign. Perhaps in four years, I’ll find a reason to share their optimism, but, frankly, I doubt it. When I look at the election numbers, I see no reason to believe that things will improve by then. After all, in spite of hearing how brilliant, how inspiring, how charismatic -- and how I hate hearing that word applied to a politician! -- Obama is, he’s the same guy whose friends, wife and religious mentor, combined with his nearly blank resume, should have kept him in the Illinois state legislature with all the other Chicago-based grifters.

The numbers, I’m afraid, tell the tale. When it came to young voters, 69% went for Obama; Jews, 78%; blacks, 96%; Catholics, 54%; Hispanics, 67%; females, 56%; 90% of Muslims. When you factor in birth rates, I’m not sure that in 2012, Republicans will get more votes than Libertarians.

Looking back, I think the left-wing cancer took root in the 1960s and the funeral took place on November 4th. That’s why I’m having a really hard time putting up with people who are so darn jubilant about Obama’s victory. To me, it’s as if they’re dancing on America’s grave.

I know that a lot of people will regard me as a racist for being so depressed over the election result. I am probably the least racist person in America. As I’ve always said, people who hate others because of their race, religion or national origin, are just plain lazy. After all, once you get to really know people, there are always better reasons than that for despising them.

Besides, it does no good to deny being a racist. Once you have to deny it, you’ve already been labeled. But I have to ask, if Hillary Clinton had been elected president and I had been upset about it, would I be branded a misogynist? The fact is, I would have been less upset if she had been elected. But that’s only because I only object to her politics and her voice. Her circle does not include the likes of Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, Father Pfleger, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Louis Farrakhan and Rashid Khalidi. Aside from Hillary Clinton’s colleagues in the Senate, her only questionable associate is Bill.

Now that American conservatives have become an endangered species, I’m wondering if Obama and his gang of compassionate liberals will give us the same consideration they give polar bears and snail darters.

One of my friends wondered how it could be that I wasn’t thrilled to see millions of black people, including Jesse Jackson and all of Kenya, in rapture over Obama’s victory. I told him it’s one thing for Obama to garner 96% of the black vote when he’s running against a Republican such as John McCain, but quite another when he got 91% of the vote in the primaries when he was running against a liberal such as Sen. Clinton. That, to me, reeks of racism, and I see no reason to celebrate it.

I went on to say that it often seems to me that it’s only conservatives who ever took to heart Martin Luther King’s fervent wish that we all learn to judge our fellow men by their character and not by the color of their skin.

I concluded by telling him that he had every reason to be ecstatic that a man who shared his politics was elected, but that Obama’s color shouldn’t enter into it, and that if I and many like me were disgruntled about the election, it had nothing to do with Obama’s pigmentation, everything to do with his character and his leftist agenda. We elected a president, after all, the leader of the free world, not a prom king.

If there is one bright spot in all this, it’s that I won’t have to spend the next four years listening to John McCain begin every sentence with “My friends.” The sad truth is, I pick my friends far more wisely than we pick our candidates or, for that matter, our presidents.