Soxblog is talking about how most Democrats are people of goodwill and suggesting that Lieberman and Gephardt be included in Bush’s new cabinet. (I suggested the same thing in my Last Word column last week in The Weekly Standard newsletter. I was thinking Lieberman for Homeland Security and Gephardt for Defense. Soxblog goes me one better: Lieberman for State. Can you imagine how meshuggeneh he would drive the Arabs and Europeans? Advantage: Soxblog.)

Just asking: Had Kerry won, do you think prominent lefty bloggers would be talking this way?

A moving tribute to the blood of heroes.

Presumably everyone has seen the story about Netscape giving a picture of the president the file name “asshole.jpg.”

While I certainly don’t condone this kind of thing, come on. It is sort of funny.

I mean, if Bush had lost the election, it would have been tacky. But a 4 million vote cushion should be enough to let Republicans chuckle.

Bill Lyon has a heart-breaking column on Joe Paterno. Coach Paterno, now in his 55th season at Penn State, is the most admirable living figure in American sports.

A month shy of 78, his Lions program has fallen into disrepair, and the chorus of those who want him to step down grows weekly. It is terrible and gut-wrenching to watch.

I interviewed Paterno once. I went through Penn State’s athletic department, and some secretary scheduled an appointment for the two of us to talk over the phone. Having grown up not far from Penn State, I was–there’s no graceful way to put it–incredibly excited.

On the day we were scheduled to talk, my phone rang exactly at the appointed hour–he was prompt to the minute. I picked up the phone and said, “Hello.” And he said, in that famous high voice of his, “Hi, Jonathan? This Joe Paterno. . . . I’m the coach of the football team at Penn State. . . . How are you?”

We talked for a long while; the conversation was as easy as talking with my grandfather. Real humility–not the fake kind politicians wear for us–is so rare. Paterno may have been the humblest man I’ve ever spoken with. And not just humble but deeply smart and wise, too.

It’s a terrible thing to see a great man struggle. I’m praying Coach Paterno is given whatever grace he needs.

First Jack Shafer, now Tom Maguire–we’re just one hit away from an Official Ana Marie Cox Backlash Trend. Maguire says:

Mr. Greenfield also mentioned Wonkette for political gossip, and cited the first thing everyone mentions when they mention the Wonkette. Groan.

Look, I understand that she needs a paycheck, that Howard Stern is a ratings monster, that sex sells, and that “Sex and the City” has extended the boundaries of hip and humorous.

I also understand that folks like Jeff Greenfield may stop by for the jokes, but they stay for the content, which I have no doubt is first rate.

That said, I am old enough to remember when comedians would substitute the ‘F’ word for a punchline – I was not a fan of shock humor then, nor have I warmed to it over the years (Yes, I made an exception for the baked beans scene in “Blazing Saddles”). And I am especially irked by my sense that Wonkette is only considered to be funny because she is a woman – would Jeff Greenfield by yukking it up if those a**-f****** jokes were coming from a guy’s site? Doubtful.

Grrr. If this is the sort of attention-seeking behavior that leads to success for female journalists, then I have a vested interest in what seems even to me to be a tired feminist argument. Since I have some smart-as-a-whip nieces and daughters who are talented researchers and writers, I would prefer that they not be evaluated on their willingness to engage in raunchy rhetoric.

What I want to know is, if Shafer and Maguire are so smart, where’s their $275,000 book advance? I can’t stand people who hate on a girl just because she’s successful and talented. Word on the street is that Cox’s forthcoming novel, Dog Days, is going to be awesome: Sort of Anna Karenina meets The Devil Wears Prada. Only with cursing and, you know, A2M.

Now available on eBay: Michael Moore’s Relevance. Be sure to read the fine print, too.

As a bonus, you can also bid on Bruce Springsteen’s ego

It isn’t gloating to look back at some of the recent stupidity of Bush hates. Take Wil Wheaton.

Over the last few days, Wheaton has set some kind of land-speed record for crazy talk. The day before the election, he wrote that “if George W. Bush wins, I will sit down, and I will cry. I will cry for my children, who will most certainly face a military draft, and I will cry for my country, because I believe that America can, and must, do better than George W. Bush.”

“A military draft”? Yeah, under Bush 2.0, they’ll be drafting young American boys left and right. But The Architect has this new computer chip that’s being implanted in children born in safe Democratic districts, see. And this way he can draft predominently Democratic kids for W.’s imperial wars. In fact, he’s not even going to draft them–he’ll just swoop down and pick them up in his black helicopter.

But young Master Crusher wasn’t that worried. “I’m pretty sure that John Kerry will win this election,” he blogged.

(In this same post, Wheaton also worried that a second Bush term would mean “Goodbye freedom from religion.” Note, that’s “freedom from religion,” not “freedom of religion.”)

Then, this morning, Wheaton posted this gem: “Apparently, my country holds a fundamentally different set of values than I thought we did, and that scares the shit out of me.”

This is just a working theory: Anyone who looks at this country and sees more divisions than binding ties is insane. The political differences between a liberal Hollywood actor and a conservative Midwestern businessman are, objectively speaking, very, vey small. Nearly all Americans share a pretty basic set of broad values; our divisions are around the margins of these values. Put another way, Tom DeLay and Barbra Streisand have more political commonalities than they do differences.

Take gay marriage, for example. The political “divide” in America is over whether homosexuals should be given full and complete access to the custom and legal definition of marriage (the Human Rights Campaign’s position) or whether they should have some modified version of a civil union that does not have the word “marriage” attached to it (President Bush’s position). Both sides agree homosexuals should have equal rights; should not be discriminated upon in the workplace; should be allowed to adopt children; should be able to live with dignity; and should, in general, be embraced by their fellow citizens.

If you want to see what a real “divide” looks like, gaze over at the Middle East, where the question is whether or not homosexuals should be jailed, tortured, and/or murdered. You’ll recall that there’s a certain faction of belief in the Middle East which is waging a war against America and seeking to impose these values on us.

This is just one example. More abound. The point is that any American who would have been “scared” by either a Bush or Kerry presidency is either crazy, embarrassingly provincial, or just plain stupid.

In America, we have an amazing luxury: Our political opponents are not evil. They are not dangerous. They do not want to kill us. And no matter what, they will abide by the ground rules of democracy, so, if we lose to them on a particular issue or election, we’ll have a chance to beat them next time around.

The people of Russia, Afghanistan, and other struggling democracies do not have this luxury. And for people like Wil Wheaton to fail to appreciate our blessing is simply shameful.

Think of all the waste that must follow an election like this. Those re-defeat Bush bumper stickers. Annoying lawn signs. Lindon LaRouche campaign literature.

But the long banner that hung earlier this week in the lobby windows of the so-called “bipartisan” Human Rights Campaign headquarters in downtown D.C. really belongs in a category of its own.

“George Bush:” it read, “You’re Fired.”

Drove by this morning. The banner’s gone. Wonder what they’ll do with it.