MG, I'm sick of the "sore loser" and "crybaby" rhetoric. There are only two contexts in which we hear these terms:

1) little kids in the schoolyards
2) people trying to defend an obviously flawed electoral process.

Whether the current election "worked" or not to elect a majority candidate is not the only issue. We have a system where many, many votes are never counted, either because machines fail to count them and we do not require hand counting, or because we simply can't be bothered (provisional ballots won't change the results anyway is the argument). This makes it very easy to arrange voter fraud if you control the electoral process (put the faulty vote-counting machines in strategic precincts and voila!) In addition, we have a relentless stream of prattling in the media as to what Bush's "Margin of victory" and "mandate" is. We will never know these things, and asked directly most of the reporters and anchors admit it. We just don't count all the ballots.

The only reason our ridiculously faulty system is tolerated is that, by definition, the country is ruled by the people who most recently benefited from the system. Whatever side that is shouts down anyone calling for reform by using schoolyard taunts like "sore loser" and "crybaby."

In years like this, when the electoral margin was very slim, and when in fact it is more than conceivable that the loser actually won, these taunts get more and more strident. Why? Because the taunters are scared. They know as well as anyone that they might actually have lost. They know we don't know who really won and that their man calls the shots essentially by good luck--his voter suppression tactics worked better than the other guy's.

In short, they are little kids on the sandlot. I think they need to grow up.