Group Therapy 

This sounds more like something out of the Onion than a real newspaper:

Twenty John Kerry supporters met for their first group therapy session in South Florida Thursday, screaming epithets at President Bush as they shared their emotions with licensed mental health counselors.

The first of several free noontime therapy sessions at the American Health Association in Boca Raton was designed to treat what mental health counselors have dubbed Post Election Selection Trauma (PEST).
...
We mostly let them vent during the first session, Gordon said. By the third session, well be doing some meditation exercises to aid some of their symptoms. We may use visualization and some techniques designed for bipolar disease and other mental disorders. That might help them adjust to reality. According to AHA officials, symptoms of PEST are similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. They include nightmares, sleeplessness, hostility, listlessness, and emotional outbursts including threats to leave the country.

Democrats not able to get over the election are PESTs? This whole thing sounds made up to me. If a psychologist really wanted to have this taken seriously, you'd think the first thing he'd do is come up with a name that didn't place a stigma on the sufferer's of this "condition". PEST? Are you kidding me? The question that we need to ask here is... What is causing all of this trauma?

One argument would be that the Republican party is to blame. That is certainly the spin on this story. The Republican party is full of religious zealots who want to convert everyone to Christianity, draft your children into a war for oil, and take "Desperate Housewives" off the air. I suppose that is one way to look at it. I don't buy into that. It is really the fault of both parties. As the country has moved more and more towards the center, the parties have been looking to the wrong place to find more votes. All they've done as of late is do what they can to rally the base. When you look at how they go about doing it, you see that the preferred tactic of both sides is trying to scare the shit out of their supporters by talking about what the other side will do if they win. The smear, they sling mud, but mostly they exaggerate... they do whatever they can to scare their most loyal supporters to the polls. The problem is that no matter what side loses, you have a group of loyal supporters who are now scared to death of the winner.

The Democrats whipped up their base into such a frenzy in order to get Kerry elected, and now they've left them hanging. In this way, PEST resembles what happens to a lot of veterans. You have people who have been fighting a war who don't know what to do now that they're home. Many would say that the government created a weapon, and then when they were done with them, just left them without support. That sounds a lot like what happened here. The Democrats trained a bunch of citizen soldiers for the election, and now that the election is over, have just left them to cry. What we really need are political parties which look to the center for votes. The country isn't full of red states or blue states. It's mostly full of purple ones. It's time that the parties realized that. Hell, it's time that these PEST suffers realized that.