Blue state bumper stickers

Jay Nordlinger:

Walked through a neighborhood of Bethesda, Md., yesterday morning. (This is just outside Washington, as you know.) Every driveway had a Washington Post thrown on it. Every car (virtually) had either a Kerry bumper sticker or, more likely, a hate-Bush sticker. Sample: "What Would Jesus Bomb?" It was the perfect image of a little, conformist village. I doubt that those Midwestern Republican towns Sinclair Lewis loved to mock could have been so suffocating.

Neo-neocon says the bumper stickers in her blue state town remained on cars for months after the election (Via Ann Althouse.).

Then one day:

I was parking at the local health food supermarket, usually a treasure-trove of cars sporting Bush-hating stickers, and I noticed something odd. The cars were bare, stripped of their messages.

What had happened? Had there been a recent special on sticker-scrapers? Or was it something else? Did everyone get the signal all at once--like when the leaves turn colors and drop from the trees because the days are getting shorter and the nights colder--that the time had come? Did it have something to do with the wave of demonstrations for democracy hitting the Arab world? Is there some sort of realization dawning, slowly but surely, that perhaps, perhaps, Bush isn't so very awful after all?