Can't Watch. Can't Not.

Stuever: On election night, Sarah Palin served as Fox News Channel's personification of hope - its poetic muse and telegenic Wonder Woman (in no-costume Diana Prince mode), wearing a salmony red dress that looked, on camera, like an elegant, soft Slanket clipped at the collar with a microphone.

"It is a big darn deal," Palin said of the results quickly overtaking the U.S. map nearby. She had just noted the incoming results of the new GOP House majority as, across the set, Bill Hemmer was finding his true calling at last: electronic map touching. It turns out Hemmer does this better than CNN's John King and NBC's Magic-Marker-dependent Chuck Todd. He was the Apple Store to their Best Buy. Simple and clean.

Not much else was simple. Election night, that most curious form of media folk dancing, has this strange way of getting more precise and more incomprehensible with each two-year cycle, but it's also the rare event in which having all those cable channel choices makes a sort of chaotic sense, facilitating our desire to yell at the TV.