Alan Wolfe is a professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. His most recent books include "The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Practice Our Faith" and "An Intellectual in Public."

The one thing we do not do is panic. With invective as treacherous and outrageous as any heaped at a candidate for national office in our history, John F. Kerry showed himself to be a man of courage, principle and commitment. He fought war against opponents who treat politics as warfare and came very close to winning. Of all the candidates who made themselves available, he was the best, and we should be grateful to him for his efforts.

The real disaster is on the legislative side. The country is in a very conservative mood, far more than I (for one) realized. For the first time in their history, Americans are about to experience what conservatism really means, and I am not sure they will be pleased with the results. As the next few years unfold, Democrats should talk about such ideas as stewardship, responsibility, long-term consequences and other such ideas that are conservative in their own way, not conservative politically, but temperamentally. We are about to experience a very radical turn in our history. Reminding Americans that their traditions also embody respect for our society as a whole -- for its historic values, its beauty, its sense of the common good -- is the kind of conservatism to which people will respond when this particular version of our long national nightmare is over.

Jay McInerney is the author of "Bright Lights, Big City" and "How It Ended."
I'm going to apply for an Irish passport. And starting tonight, I'm going to read "Civil Disobedience" to my kids.

Anne Lamott is a Salon columnist and the author of "Bird by Bird," "Operating Instructions," "Traveling Mercies" and many other books.
I don't have a clue what we're going to do, outside of what we always do when we are crushed -- when, say, a close friend dies suddenly, which is sort of how this leaves me feeling. We'll feel like shit for a while, together. We'll let some time pass, together. We'll take care of each other. We'll especially take care of the people who were already really sick before the election. We'll do the laundry. We'll baby ourselves for a few days. (I personally am going to finish off every single bit of Halloween candy.) We'll make lots of indoor domestic lights, as the darkness increases -- fires in the fireplaces, candles on the mantel. Then we'll feel better, and only feel sick to our stomachs off and on. Those of us with kids who will be of draft age soon will have to figure out where we need to move to, but in the meantime, our dogs will need to be walked. Then we'll remember that we have a dream, and those of us in an increasingly vast left-wing conspiracy will begin to think about our strategy for the midterms.

Mark Crispin Miller is a media critic, professor of communications at New York University, and author, most recently, of "Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order."
First of all, this election was definitely rigged. I have no doubt about it. It's a statistical impossibility that Bush got 8 million more votes than he got last time. In 2000, he got 15 million votes from right-wing Christians, and there are approximately 19 million of them in the country. They were eager to get the other 4 million. That was pretty much Karl Rove's strategy to get Bush elected.

But given Bush's low popularity ratings and the enormous number of new voters -- who skewed Democratic -- there is no way in the world that Bush got 8 million more votes this time. I think it had a lot to do with the electronic voting machines. Those machines are completely untrustworthy, and that's why the Republicans use them. Then there's the fact that the immediate claim of Ohio was not contested by the news media -- when Andrew Card came out and claimed the state, not only were the votes in Ohio not counted, they weren't even all cast.

I would have to hear a much stronger argument for the authenticity, or I should say the veracity, of this popular vote for Bush before I'm willing to believe it. If someone can prove to me that it happened, that Bush somehow pulled 8 million magic votes out of a hat, OK, I'll accept it. I'm an independent, not a Democrat, and I'm not living in denial.

And that's not even talking about Florida, which is about as Democratic a state as Guatemala used to be. The news media is obliged to make the Republicans account for all these votes, and account for the way they were counted. Simply to embrace this result as definitive is irrational. But there is every reason to question it ... I find it beyond belief that the press in this formerly democratic country would not have made the integrity of the electoral system a front page, top-of-the-line story for the last three years. I worked and worked and worked to get that story into the media, and no one touched it until your guy did.

I actually got invited to a Kerry fundraiser so I could talk to him about it. I raised the issue directly with him and with Teresa. Teresa was really indignant and really concerned, but Kerry just looked down at me -- he's about 9 feet tall -- and I could tell it just didn't register. It set off all his conspiracy-theory alarms and he just wasn't listening.

Talk to anyone from a real democracy -- from Canada or any European country or India. They are staggered to discover that 80 percent of our touch-screen electronic voting machines have no paper trail and are manufactured by companies owned by Bush Republicans. But there is very little sense of outrage here. Americans for a host of reasons have become alienated from the spirit of the Bill of Rights and that should not be tolerated.

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