S.N.A.F.U.

Well, that will be Petey's last prediction for awhile -- or at least the last one I'll take seriously.

Get this: now he's blaming Hurricane Sandy and that bloated Springsteen-loving Jersey retard -- as if we wouldn't be totally f*cked anyway because impressionable independents are even stupider than we thought.

After all that money, does it really come down to a bunch of impressionable idiots watching pictures on TV?

C'mon. When was it ever any different?

Oh well. At least the country will be ungovernable now that Obama has waged the most expensive campaign of character assassination in world history.

Yeah, he got his revenge against us, we'll give him that. Well done, assoul. Finally you've earned your Peace Prize and can stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Yasser Arafat without feeling a little embarrassed. Welcome to the club. You've made your bones.

But it's going to be a bit like Michael Corleone staring out over Lake Tahoe after whacking everyone who stood in his way. One of those... something victories. What's the word, Jeeves? Yes, pyrrhic.

One consolation is that a Romney victory would have hardly augured a pleasant four years. Rather, journalists would have suddenly remembered their vocation, and their latent Bush Derangement virus would have again become florid.

Homelessness would have suddenly been rediscovered. Al Qaeda would again be on the move. The dramatic increase in Black poverty would be a scandal. Snatching defeat from victory in Iraq. Nuclear mullahfolkers. An unsustainable level of government debt would provoke shock, shock.

To say nothing of the new War on Women, the rampant racism, the Mormon Theocracy, our outraged frenemies in Old Europe.... Pulitzers all around!

I'm with Taranto, but then I'm always with Taranto. In any event, if the Cosmos sees fit to grant our modern-day Lincoln a second term, he asks, "how bad could it be?"

"Obama has spent the past four years explaining away his failings by essentially arguing he is the best of all possible presidents -- that he has done as well as any man could given the 'mess' he 'inherited' from his predecessor."

Yes, but "things are about to get a lot worse because of decisions taken but deferred during the Obama years." If he thought the Bushmess was bad, wait until he gets a load of the Obamamess.

The mess "includes not only high unemployment and slow growth but impending policy changes that threaten to make those problems worse. On Jan. 1, unless Congress acts, the Bush tax cuts expire" -- or in Obama's more accurate words, we're about to be hit with "massive, job-killing tax increases."

And ObamaCare was of course written so deceptively "that most of its provisions would not take effect until the next presidential term," not the least of which being "an additional massive, job-killing tax increase (on investment income), also scheduled to take effect Jan. 1."

The state-run media will have its laziness cut out for it this time, but it would be a mistake to underestimate their determination to lie and deceive. With this presidential campaign they crossed a rubiconjob from merely shaping and imposing their narrative to outright fabrication and brazen denial of reality.

The election proved that a lot of semiconscious Americans still take the MSMistry of Truth seriously.

As a result, I would say that we'll really have to reach bottom in a completely undeniable way before things can turn around -- like a guy who finally stops chewing tobacco after they remove his jaw.

Look at California, which is totally run by Democrats who betray absolutely no ability to see that yawning fiscal abyss up ahead or to take their foot off the gas. For them, a red inklight means gun it!

But if things cannot go on, they will not go on. It's just a matter of when, which cannot be predicted by any linear model. Rather, it's going to be like chaos theory, and occur with no hiatus, allofasudden: a fold catastrophe.

Of course, no one knows the hour, but Petey still thinks it will be on or about 12.12.12.

I didn't want this post to be about the election, but what can you do? I don't want pretend it's not on my mind, and try to write around it. It takes a moment to gather yourself after you've been kicked in the nuts. But I promise that tomorrow everything around here will be back to abnormal. And this is the last time I'll forget to gird myself with the Cup of Righteousness.