Via Making Light, here's the concession speech at least some on the left wish that Kerry had given.

This bit makes me especially nauseous:

There are some who would say that I sound bitter, that now is the time for healing, to bring the nation together. Let me tell you a little story. Last night, I watched the returns come in with some friends here in Los Angeles. As the night progressed, people began to talk half-seriously about secession, a red state / blue state split. The reasoning was this: We in blue states produce the vast majority of the wealth in this country and pay the most taxes, and you in the red states receive the majority of the money from those taxes while complaining about 'em. We in the blue states are the only ones who've been attacked by foreign terrorists, yet you in the red states are gung ho to fight a war in our name. We in the blue states produce the entertainment that you consume so greedily each day, while you in the red states show open disdain for us and our values. Blue state civilians are the actual victims and targets of the war on terror, while red state civilians are the ones standing behind us and yelling "Oh, yeah!? Bring it on!"

Yes, we red staters are a bunch of useless hicks goading terrorists into striking blue states. To boot, we're apparently leeches on the underbelly of the blue states, the real America.

I couldn't come up with a better refutation to this divisive nonsense than this reply by James Lileks to a similar sentiment from a letter to the NY Times:

In the New York Times, some angst from our betters:

"Everybody seems to hate us these days," said Zito Joseph, a 63-year-old retired psychiatrist. "None of the people who are likely to be hit by a terrorist attack voted for Bush. But the heartland people seemed to be saying, 'We're not affected by it if there would be another terrorist attack.' "

Sir. Please. First of all, on a purely practical level, if New York takes a hit, the economy takes a hit. There are people in North Dakota who write financial management software used by big companies. The economy goes south for a year, they might well go south forever. On an emotional level, an attack on New York is an attack on us all. No one tunes in at midnight on New Year’s Eve to watch the corn cob drop in Des Moines, or whatever they do. For that matter, we simple folk in flyoverland tune in at eleven o’clock to watch New York declare the old year dead. Our own midnight feels like an anticlimax. We don’t even mind that you came up with the next new year first; hell, we’re used to it. We get one more hour out of the old one, and that’s fine.

That said, if I may quote Rita Moreno, who sang the greatest lyric of the latter half of the 20th century: I like the Island Manhattan. Smoke on your pipe and put that in. I could never live there, because I need space and mobility in terms the city can’t provide. But once a year I go there, and I never feel as alive as I do my first day in town. I’m not sure I could take that much exultation on a daily basis, and I would hate to become used to the Chanin Building at night, or the great golden sky of Grand Central. More than that, it’s the small places that abide, the idea that I can walk into Beekman Liquors on Lex and feel as though I stepped back one year, five, ten, thirty. It’s a miraculous place, if only for the sheer variety of ordinary things it provides. Just as every man feels himself somewhat less for never having been a soldier, every man would like to think he could have been a New Yorker in the classic mold, however he defines it. Hate you? I love you more than you know.

It's true.