The last time I updated this blog, back in the halcyon days of September 2004, we were a month and a half away from a presidential election that promised to send a Massachusetts liberal to the White House, a Massachusetts liberal who inspired me to vote for the very first time in my life.

I realize this is a bit dated, but stay with me: So on November 2nd, I woke up early and walked three blocks to my polling place, and I stood in line feeling very nervous because I had never voted before and I usually find a way to screw these things up. Here in the Land of Lincoln, we still use punch-card ballots, because 1. if it was good enough for Lincoln, it's good enough for us, and 2. they make it easier for the dead to vote.

So I stood at my little booth sweating bullets, and punched my stylus through the appropriate holes for John "It's Hard to Unseat a Wartime President" Kerry for president and Barack "Our Next President" Obama for U. S. Senate, and then I flipped to the next page.

But then I got very nervous, so I pulled out my punchcard to make sure I'd punched the right holes. And it turns out that, like an elderly resident of Palm Beach Count in 2000, I had punched the wrong holes completely.

Now, one thing I should say right now is that I live in the 20th precinct of the 47th ward of Chicago. To say that my precinct is reliably Democratic is to understate the matter dramatically. 80% of people in the 20th voted for John Kerry, and the remaining 20% were either kidding or voted for Bush by accident.

Which is exactly what happened to me. I'd just cast the first vote of my life for George W. Bush. And since I was very nervous and generally flustered and didn't know what to do, I sort of panicked. I held up my ballot and said, rather too loudly, "I JUST VOTED FOR GEORGE BUSH BY ACCIDENT! SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME!"

It turns out that if you vote for the wrong guy by accident, they let you vote again, but you have to go to the "Corrections Booth," which is the voting equivalent of the dunce cap. So I stood at the Corrections Booth, and I voted for all the people I wanted to vote for, and I voted for all the measures that would increase my taxes because I love taxes and think they get a bad rap.

And then the system worked: My guy lost; my beloved taxes were voted down. The last few months, a lot of people have blamed it on vote fraud, on the big media conglomerates lying to the people, on the Republicans' hijacking of the term "moral values" to appear populist. Maybe, but I tend to think it's simpler than that: We elected, narrowly, a bad President. That's been happening off and on since the beginning of our noble experiment (Dick Nixon, Warren Harding, and James Buchanan, to name but a few).

Take it from a Cubs fan: We'll get 'em in 2008.