CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- The election is over and there are plenty of people willing to weigh in and dissect what happened. These are a few of my thoughts.

Congratulations to the Statewide GOP for giving a black eye to the Manchin Mafia! Manchin, his minion Puccio, and Tomblin seem to have no idea how sick and tired people are of his machine. The State Democratic Party gave NO help to Sue Thorn in her run, apparently because she's not part of the inner circle. Doug Skaff, of course, is! And he's the one with the plan that lost Bonnie Brown her seat. Perhaps we can expect vaginal probe legislation in the next session, unless someone grows some brains out there.

Manchin recently made the unctuous suggestion that the President should "make a healing visit to all 50 states," as though he has the time. Profound disgust registered here at my house. I have a better suggestion: Hey Joe? Why not make a visit to all 55 counties of West Virginia and apologize to the 172,000 of us who voted for Obama for your own moral cowardice and your non-support of Democratic candidates?

Nationally, Mitt lost, so sorry say my crocodile tears. All the tea baggers lost except the perfectly insane Michelle Bachman who will be around a while longer with her whack ideas to help out the cartoonists and comedians. Allan West, the wild man in Florida, refused to concede he lost and yelled for a recount, although the margin was not high enough to trigger one automatically.

Mitt lost because the GOP couldn't find a candidate willing to run against Obama, except a bunch of nuts and kooks and incompetents. Take Gingrich. Wowee! A colony on the moon? He's been sniffing too much manure in the zoos he spent so much time visiting. Ms. Ann Romney was no help either; every time she opened her mouth some clanger fell out which had some of us wondering how mentally stable her husband was, particularly after seeing him get so rattled in the last two debates. Also, it didn't help Mitt that the obvious losers wouldn't drop out of the primaries. Got to hand it to the lovely raccoon-eyed lunatic Anne Coulter; she told a bunch of them, before she flipped into line that if Romney was the nominee, the GOP would lose, and she was spot on for once.

Other losers include Dear Rush Limbaugh, Sheldon Adelson, Karl Rove and the Koch brothers. Oh, and also ALEC (the group that crafts all that neat voter suppression legislation and anti-union stuff.) Nationally, they got less than 1 percent return for all the billions thrown away.

Winners? The nation. The sky will not fall; the stock market will, at least until the House of Representatives under Cantor stops playing games with the debt ceiling. Women won big in the Senate, particularly with the addition of Elizabeth Warren. The threat of another Alito or Scalia or Thomas on the Supreme Court is averted for four years, which is a Very Good Thing, indeed!

Claymore, a retired teacher, is a Gazette contributing columnist.