When you surf over to The New York Times the morning before Election Day and see the headline “Offering G.O.P. as 2010 Version of Change” over the teaser “John A. Boehner, who hopes to be the next speaker, is running against Washington after 18 years in Congress,” it’s easy to spit coffee into your keyboard and consider drastic action, like hanging yourself or someone else.

Rewarding this conniving, pumpkin-colored ward heeler with a majority in the House and the speakership on top of it is like electing the dog speaker of your house after he gets into the garbage and then shits all over the living room.

The stormcrows in the media have spent months awk-awk-awking about the ass-whuppin’ the Donks are gonna get on Tuesday, and now it’s upon us. Part of me hopes we get it, in spades. A nation with an attention span measurable in nanoseconds, which oscillates improbably and inexplicably from Clinton to Bush to Obama, deserves a righteous, brass-knuckled, wake-the-fuck-up sort of dope-slap.

Of course, this would mean that the innocent would suffer alongside the guilty. So instead I choose to think about the crowds that stormed our house last night for Halloween. It was a bumper crop of costumes, a record turnout that wiped us completely out of candy for the first time ever, and there wasn’t a single, solitary sourpuss among the escorting parents despite our yard full of signs pimping Democratic candidates in solidly Republican Bibleburg.

You could take this as a sign of the dire times — can’t afford food, so let’s hit the streets for some free sugar — but I’m going to vote against my own best judgment and call it a sign of (what else) hope.

“You know, I think there are more of us than they think,” said a passer-by the other day, applauding our choice of candidates.

Let’s hope so. Get out there and pull those levers, folks. Unless you like the idea of having the Great Pumpkin two steps away from the presidency.

You gotta feel for Jon Stewart, who has one of the toughest jobs in show business. He has to be informed, folksy, intelligent, self-deprecating, persistent, polite, informative without being pedantic and both witty and funny simultaneously, which is not easy.

And today, he had to be reasonable.

Oy. Reasonable. How’s a guy supposed to run a 150,000-person rally on the Washington Mall being reasonable?

Pretty well, actually. Considering the self-imposed handicap, Stewart and Stephen Colbert could’ve done worse with their Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Some of the musical guests were predictable (John Legend, Sheryl Crow), others less so (the O’Jays and Ozzy Osbourne).

I could have done without a benediction from Don Novello’s Father Guido Sarducci, an act that should’ve gotten the hook about 20 years ago. I’d also have liked to have seen the Mythbusters orchestrate the crowd into a halftime-show marching-band arrangement that spelled “WTF?”, something a guy could see from the International Space Station, just in case the aliens are watching. But I’m funny that way. Maybe not.

Stewart was Stewart, albeit dialed down a couple of notches. But Colbert gets the Doggy for best gag. He “honored” the mainstream media (including The New York Times, CNN and NPR) with one of his Fear Medals for ordering their employees not to attend the rally, and then draped it around the neck of someone with more guts — a 7-year-old girl.

I would’ve liked more snark, but then I’m a bitter old left-wing partisan media hack. And even I, Captain Cynical, got a little lift from seeing all those folks in one place, having a more or less good time. No screamers, no book-burners; nobody with fake blood (or the real deal) on his or her hands, or being hanged in effigy. Just a bunch of folks who had come to the nation’s capital to be reasonable.

Let’s hope we send a few more of them there on Tuesday.