I surrendered at three o’clock in the morning after watching election returns for eight straight hours, and fell asleep convinced GW had won but oddly unemotional. Up at six to get my 12 year-old to school and let my wife sleep, I fussed away the morning with newspapers and the computer. Checking Fox again for the umpteenth time at eleven, when the announcement came that Kerry had called Bush to concede I didn’t yell or jump for joy. An emotional dam broke instead, and I just sat and cried my heart out with relief.

America’s future is on track. Cokie Roberts on NPR stated that, more than Iraq or terrorism or the economy or anything else, exit polls showed that “moral values” was the issue of highest concern to voters. Bill Strauss and Neil Howe would not be surprised.

I wrote about Strauss and Howe in The Curse of the Xer’s (TTP, February 5, 2004, currently up in Classics, and providing a capsule summary of their theory). Using their model of generational cycles, I predicted that:

American culture has not disintegrated, we’re not going to keep heading down into a bottomless cultural barrel. We’re in the bottom of a generational cycle that our country has gone through before and will again. Our nightmare of degeneracy will soon be coming to an end.

OK, I’ve taken off the black hat I wore to write “The 279 Trigger” and I’m back to normal now. So forgive me if I poach a title from an article I wrote last February, but Shut Down is still the best way to describe my electoral predictions for next Tuesday.

So step right up and get ‘em, folks, while they’re hot. Bottom line: Bush wins not in a landslide, but not close either - a comfortable victory garnering 52-53% of the total vote, and between 290-310 electoral votes.

Let’s face it -when Bush might take Hawaii, you know Kerry is in deep scatology.

The contempt I have for Bill Clinton doesn’t come remotely close to the revulsion I have for John Kerry. While I despise Bill Clinton on many grounds, I don’t question his patriotism. I would question John Kerry’s - if he had any patriotism to question. For all his faults, Bill Clinton is not a traitor to America. John Kerry is.

Many of you have asked what is the October Surprise of the SwiftVets that I mentioned last month. This is it.

While I am an incurable optimist, today I’m putting on my black hat and taking a look at the dark side.

All those prayers that whoever wins on the 2nd let it be a clear and convincing win, are just whistles in the twilight. The litigation war contesting 2004 will make 2000 look like a small skirmish. Kerry has made a decision: that if the electoral vote is less than 280 - that is, even if Bush wins by 9 electoral votes -- he will not concede. It takes 50%+1 of the 538 in total: 270.

Recall that Al Gore did concede late Tuesday night November 7th - then rescinded his concession after midnight, launching his legal war to win the presidency in the courts. That’s the precedent. The Democrats have decided that with the precedent established, they will make the same attempt again. 279 is the trigger - if Bush wins states that add up to no more than 279 electoral votes, Kerry refuses to concede and legally contests the results.

Confronted with Kerry’s decision, Bush has now decided he will do the same.

When I was State Chairman of Youth For Reagan during Reagan’s original campaign for California Governor in 1966, I assembled a memorable cast of characters.

There was Mr. Energy, Shawn Steel (who just retired as chairman of the California Republican Party), Mr. Enthusiasm, Dana Rohrabacher (now R-CA), our resident geniuses Arnie Steinberg (now the famous pollster) and Dennis Turner (whom we still call The Wizard), and the gorgeous Tammy Zebold in charge of the Reagan Girls. But most lovable and memorable of all was our Social Director, Bill Anthony.

I had known Bill since we met in UCLA College Republicans in 1962. It was virtually impossible to dislike Bill. There was only one thing that really bugged him, that he would grouse about. He put it as an unfathomable mystery, a question for which he had no answer: “Why can’t the Right be hip?”

Because no one was hipper, no one was cooler, no one was more plugged in than Bill. And it drove him crazy that the Barking Moonbats of the Left were perceived by society as jet-set couth, while denizens of the Right were sneered at as uncultured redneck troglodytes.

Bill always dreamed of a time in the distant future when the Right would be Hip, and the Left’s clueless hypocrisy was exposed for everyone to witness - exposed, Bill dreamed, by those who set the standards of hipness in popular culture, the guys in Hollywood.

Yet even in Bill’s very creative imagination, not even he could have come remotely close to guessing how this dream would be achieved in the 21st century. For it has been - by two Hollywood guys named Trey Parker and Matt Stone. They have made Bill Anthony’s dream come true, by making a movie called Team America.

Have you ever been to Iowa? Even if not, you know that it’s a middle-size state, smaller than Wisconsin and a little bigger than Arkansas. Now imagine Iowa with over 140 million people, half of the entire US population. Then let’s reroute the Mississippi and Missouri rivers so they both run through Iowa and flood the place so much that most Iowans have to build their homes on stilts. To complete the picture, let’s say these vast swarms of Iowans are as poor and uneducated as Appalachian trailer park folk, and, oh yes - they are Moslem.

As you may have guessed, we’re not in Iowa any longer, Toto. We’re in Bangladesh.

The only time Bangladesh appears on most of our radar scopes, is when we give a passing glance to yet another story of a flood or typhoon wiping out ten thousand villages, or a ferry sinking with ten thousand people drowned, and so forth. When we think of Moslem countries and terrorist crucibles, other places come to mind like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan. But it’s time to refocus - because there’s a cat fight going on in this land of 140 million Moslem souls that has major implications in the War on Islamofascism.

Scorpio was suspended in the clear night sky above Ghazni, Afghanistan. The air was so pure the tiny two stars of Lambda and Upsilon in Scorpio’s stinger shone brightly. The city below was quiet, the only sounds were emplacements of government soldiers calling out to each other to watch for Mujahaddin attacks. Every few seconds one of them would fire off a round or two from a Dashaka machine gun, the tracer bullets creating bright day-glo pink arcs through the dark.

Looming in front of me was the enormous rock fortress of Bala Hissar, on top of which were the barracks and headquarters of the Soviet High Command for Ghazni, lit up with huge floodlights. It was August of 1984 and I was with a group of Harakat Mujahaddin about to attack the fortress.

So now the fate of our country rides on which George Bush will show up in St. Louis tonight, the one we saw in Coral Gables or the one in Wilkes-Barre. If the latter, GW has the capacity to do Kerry in once and for all. To go for the jugular, he could make the following points:

My opponent keeps using the word “truth.” Well, here’s the truth. Our troops who are putting their lives on the line in fighting the war on terrorism in Iraq cannot trust a man who, when he was in uniform, publicly accused his fellow soldiers of war crimes he knew they did not commit. Senator Kerry owes his fellow Vietnam Veterans an apology for calling them war criminals and I expect to hear it right here tonight.

America cannot afford such a man as my opponent as her president. America cannot afford a president who is all style and no substance - tall, big hair, deep voice uttering eloquent phrases that constantly contradict each other. It’s all frosting and no cake, folks.

America cannot afford a president who has never owned or managed a business, never met a payroll, doesn’t have the slightest clue of how businesses work, never been an employee of a company and hasn’t a clue of what it’s like to work for a living.

America cannot afford a president who has no record of accomplishment in 20 years in the Senate. America cannot afford a president who has never held any executive position and never managed any sort of organization, who has done nothing in his 20 years as a Senator except talk -- talk on the Senate floor, talk in speeches, talk to the press, and vote badly, vote consistently in ways that would damage American security.