There isn’t much left to say, and so we at the Hayride are going to call a one-day general posting strike in protest of the election results tonight.

We’ll return on Thursday.

When we do, we’ll discuss the Louisiana elections which will be going to runoffs. And those which were decided tonight.

As for national politics, we probably won’t have much to say.

Because what tonight’s election showed is that the American electorate has degraded very, very badly in the last decade.

Exit polling indicates that this electorate was a D+6 electorate. 38 percent Democrat, 32 percent Republican. I didn’t think that was possible. I was wrong.

Obama ran and won with an atrocious record, without anything remotely resembling a positive agenda for a second term, with a campaign based on lies, slander and hatred.

That’s what he ran on. And that’s what he won on.

I could blame Mitt Romney for whatever mistakes he may have made, but the fact is this a good man who was honest, earnest and positive. And he exuded character and accomplishment throughout the race, and his campaign reflected those qualities.

Romney was not my primary choice. But as the GOP nominee he performed admirably.

This was not Romney’s fault. If the electorate is D+6 or D+7 over the last two presidential elections, he’s just not going to be able to win no matter what he does.

The problem isn’t with Romney. The problem isn’t with the GOP’s consultants and strategists. The problem isn’t with the GOP’s messaging. The problem isn’t the Bible-beaters, the Ron Paul crowd, the country clubbers, the corporate types.

None of those people are the problem. We’re going to spend the next several months chewing each other to pieces about why the Republican Party is incapable of beating the worst president the country has ever seen, or getting three lousy Senate seats so as to depose the worst Senate Majority Leader the country has ever seen. But what we’re missing the boat on is that it’s not our fault.

It’s the electorate’s fault.

The current iteration of the Democrat Party is socialist to the core. It isn’t amoral, it’s deliberately immoral. It believes in government-sponsored infanticide, government-sponsored theft, unpatrolled borders, the destruction of the 2nd Amendment, the deliberate destruction of Pax Americana in favor of what can only be envisioned as the rise of a Muslim caliphate and the deliberate destruction of the nuclear family. It believes in the redistribution of wealth rather than its creation, which is perhaps the most offensive concept to the American economic ideal imaginable.

It believes these things and it no longer hides from them, as it once did.

And yet that party is able to get a man of such demonstrably meager achievement and shallow character re-elected because it can command six more percent of its adherents to the polls than a Republican Party that raises and spends ONE BILLION DOLLARS to run an honorable campaign offering the American people a positive alternative.

What can be taken from this? We no longer have a nation worthy of that positive alternative. We have a nation willing to believe something is wrong with a man who makes millions of dollars in private business as a potential public servant. We have a nation willing to be distracted by the likes of Sandra Fluke.

At the end of the day, we’ve had a half-century of cultural decline in this country since the early 1960’s. You cannot endure a half-century of cultural decline without paying the price in leadership.

Tonight we paid that price.

And for the next four years we will pay far more dearly.

In January, America hits the fiscal cliff. The GOP still holds the House of Representatives, so it can fight a holding action against full-on socialism. And the 2014 elections offer another tantalizing opportunity for Republicans to regain the Senate.

But the damage that will be done to our economy as a result of that holding action against an economic illiterate president unencumbered by re-election is incalculable. Taxes will rise, and Obama will blame John Boehner. The economy will contract, and he’ll blame Republicans. Sequestration will gut our military, and our enemies will take advantage.

In four years we will not recognize our country. In four years we will be without any illusions about the fact that we are in an economic depression. And in four years we will have a war – because war typically follows depression.

We will hit the debt ceiling. Not the one Congress debates raising every few months – the real debt ceiling. The one which happens when you go to the bond market looking to sell Treasury debt and can’t find buyers. Either that, or we go toward a full-on monetization of our debt.

Our choice will be Greece or the Weimar Republic. Or perhaps both.

Half the country voted against this future. But the other half didn’t. And because, given that choice, they opted for decline and the loss of individual responsibility and freedom.

Mitt Romney was never more correct than when he said to that crowd – and the hidden camera he didn’t know was there – in Florida that 47 percent of the population thinks of themselves as victims, doesn’t pay taxes and refuses to take responsibility. He was castigated for saying it, but he spoke the truth.

In this country, in 2012, the truth will cost you an election. Whether that statement did the deed to Romney is hard to say. But it didn’t help him.

This country needs to take a hard look in the mirror. We’re teaching our children values our grandparents can’t even fathom, we’re abandoning what made us great and we are knowingly watching our country decline.

Fixing this will require a much better America than tonight’s election showed that we have.

We will bear a terrible, terrible cost of this sad reality over the next four years. What will be left in four years, we can only imagine.

Pray. Buy gold. Live the best life you can. But know that our country is in dire straits and bad times are coming.