Somewhere deep in the bowels of the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center which is naturally connected by a series of secret, rotting, subterranean vacuum tunnels to the National Security Agency and the Homeland Security Department and Dick Cheney's nipple-torture fetish room, is a vicious little computer bank running an encephalitic version of Microsoft Vista that's right now churning through some sort of satanic algorithm designed to mine enormous piles of chaotic data from a million unreliable global sources, all in an effort to add tens of thousands more names to the US government's specious and hugely flawed master terrorist watch list and oh my God look at that, 500 more were just added in the time it took you to read this fantastic little sentence.

Fast forward to Election Day 2008: Network anchors, cable pundits, and state and local election officials are going nuts as evening hours pass and voter turnout is hardly approaching 20 percent nearly everywhere. "What's going on?" everyone is asking incredulously. TV and computer screens all over the planet show Americans in streets celebrating and shouting things like "We've had enough political corruption. We're not going to take anymore!"

In contrast, news anchors are grim and aghast with little help from spin-fatigued and stammering Democratic and Republican spokespeople. At 2 AM on NBC Brian Williams sits with Tim Russett and Keith Olbermann, and sums up: "Americans have spoken and American politics have changed forever." "It's like the nightmare of entertainers: nobody shows up for their event," says bemused Olbermann. Russett grimly observes, "We should have seen this coming; people have been fed up with both parties for a long time." Meanwhile, the Internet is buzzing with talk of voiding the presidential and congressional election results, that President Bush may declare a national state of emergency, and that the Supreme Court might step in again. Did anyone think that the Constitution required a minimum voter turnout to make elections legit?

Our democracy is in peril, and unless the Democrats, and the Congress, stand up for the Constitution, we are going to lose our country.