After the shock — I thought the power of incumbency, if nothing else, would keep the Senate for Republicans, even while losing the House — you know what my first thought was? I felt sorry for Democrats, more specifically for the elite-identified secular liberals whose views so dominate news coverage, the academy, and Hollywood. Because without power, they’re nothing.

With my guys on the outs, I still get up, read my Bible, say my prayers, and start my day as a Christian. I still have two sons who love their Bible church Sunday school, and an older son who has firmly decided on a military career, and is coherently beginning to pursue that career. I have the best wife in the world.

The fundamentals of my world remain in place, exactly as they were.

I will have to be firmer in my resolve to make my own world apart from the government-defined society at large, and I expect many of my fellow conservatives have been confirmed in this kind of decision, too. We will have to forget public schools, for example, just put them firmly behind us. As I have told more than one talk show host, the liberal agenda for public schools will result in those schools teaching my sons how to b**t f**k. No thanks.

My stock market portfolio will take some pulling back. Nancy Pelosi has set her sights explicitly on the tax cuts that have driven the current prosperity. If I read the recent movement of markets correctly, the bullish gains of the last two days — notably without big volume trading behind them — reflected a last desperate hope that the Republicans wouldn’t lose too badly. Now that that loss has taken place, I look for a selloff.

I had hoped to make a little more money before the end of the year, but I don’t think that’s going to happen now.

The thing I feel sorriest about? I grew up in a newspaper family, three generations’ worth. The press started to get spoiled by its overweaning excesses in pursuit of Nixon, and by Nixon’s fall in the Watergate business. That behavior, however, pales in comparison to the utter disgrace of journalism’s conduct toward the Bush administration and toward America itself.

My once beloved institution, the world of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, of Will Rogers and H. Allen Smith and Ernie Pyle, has been taken over by the likes of Jonathan Alter and Keith Olbermann. It’s no joke that the most iconic news broadcast today is a joke, the “Daily Show.”

But I’m still me, and thank heavens for the Internet. Guard it well, mes amis. For a while, it may be all we have left.

Look for an accelerating population shift over the next two years, as more and more disgusted conservatives leave liberal states. Look for a more polarized country — yes, even more. But we’re still us, and Democrats, in power, are likely to overreach and show us who they really are. We’ve got the best bench in Presidential candidates, by far, and things will get better. It won’t take long.