Here's a subtle but prevalent example of the politics of coercion, and another reason to say, "Thank God we won on Election Day." If you live near colleges and universities, defaced stop signs are as abundant as those left untouched. Occasionally the suburbs and urban thoroughfares get marked. Some are stenciled, the results of an obviously organized effort; others, like this one, on a street in my parents' neighborhood called Park Place, are just crude vandalizations with a spray can. I can remember having seen this sort of thing for almost a decade. Usually drivers are instructed to stop wearing fur or eating meat; for some signs it's the World Bank (whose dissolution isn’t a bad idea in itself, but not worth wrecking a stop sign). When President Bush began take actions that aggravated the nihilist left, like asserting American power and staking a claim for the moral superiority of capitalist democracy, his name began to appear on red octagons, too.

Over the years, for all the scores of signs, I've never seen nor heard of a defacing that advocated anything other than a leftist cause.

The most stinging irony in all of this is that the person who did it is most likely of the demographic that's least likely to advance a cause by actually voting. Too bad, kid.