President Bush is being blamed for yet another death. This time he's responsible for the suicide of an author from California, who obviously was suffering from the later stages of Post Election Selection Trauma (PEST).

In a harrowing 2002 book, Jonathan Aurthur chronicled his son Charley's long struggle with mental illness and his suicidal leap, at 23, from Lincoln Boulevard into the morning rush-hour traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway.

Eleven days after Charley's death on Nov. 1, 1996, Aurthur visited the overpass, peered down at the traffic and walked away feeling oddly liberated. "[Charley's] terrible affliction and suffering had imprisoned him but it had also imprisoned me," he wrote, "and now both of us were free."

Aurthur did not remain free, however. The longtime wetlands advocate, who friends said was despondent over mounting debt, his son's suicide and the reelection of President Bush, leaped to his death from a 500-foot cliff in the Angeles National Forest. A search-and-rescue team found his battered body Nov. 29, after he had been missing since Nov. 22. He was 56.

How will the Democrats ever regain power if their supporters keep dying off (or, as if there was a difference, moving to Canada)?