’08/12 Election

Farewell to the thief

'08/12 Election, Madness of King George
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crowds of hope

And so it comes to an end, eight years too late, not with a bang but with a whimper. George Bush is no longer president, Dick Cheney is out of power and America finally has a president again we can be disappointed in, but also have hopes for. Things won’t get perfect, but there now is a chance they will get better. Goodbye Bush. You won’t be missed. So long Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condi, Rove and the rest of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. If only that chopper could fly all the way to Den Haag and the International Court of Justice. It’s been a long eight years of anger and despair but they’re finally over.

“We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

Now we’re at the beginning of a new era, perhaps “the early days of a better nation”. With the election of Obama Americans rejected not just everything Bush stood for, they first rejected the old school centrist Democratic Party politics of his rival, Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama, though he himself may not be, is the president of the left and with his inauguration a space is created for those of us on the left to help built an America that adheres to the ideals and spirit of the broad left, as Bush created a space for all the worst in America. This is our chance and our responsibility to help create a better America, a better world and Obama is the symbol of that chance. One woman I heard interviewed earlier this week, when asked about all the hopes and dreams invested in Obama and how difficult it would be for him to fullfill all those dreams, said it best when she said that Obama’s election slogan was “yes, we can”: he doesn’t need to do it alone, we all have to work with him.

One more day…

'08/12 Election, Madness of King George, US politics, Video
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Communist fellow travellers sing red propaganda song at Obama inauguration party shock!

My first political memory is of hearing Carter lose the election to Reagan on the radio when I was six. Since then the US has never really had a president you can be proud of. Reagan was a shambling corpse held together by cuecards and tons of makeup, Bush 41 was a charmless CIA bureaucrat who barfed up his dinner in the lap of the Japanese prime minister, Bill Clinton had his charms but no substance, a bit of a clown and finally Bush 43 was a smirking fratboy asshole and a (not so) dry drunk to boot. But Obama just looks good, like a regular human being, not warped by too many years in Washington yet. Bush was hyped as a regular guy you’d like to have a beer with, but Obama actually fits that description and what’s more, you could see him as an actual leader, not just in the White House, but equally well
in a local neighbourhood activist group or something like that. In all the coverage of the election campaign and after, I’ve never seen him look uncomfortable or anything other than himself. He just looks like a proper president.

And yes, appearances aren’t everything, and yes, as a socialist or any sort of leftist he’s sure to disappoint us, he’s not going to get the revolution started, he’s not going to change the system. But dammit, it’s been so long since there actually has been any president who is even capable of disappointing us.

Post-election gloat: the betrayal of the wingnuts

'08/12 Election, US politics, Wingnuts
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It’s good to gloat, isn’t it? Not only did America vote for socialism, according to the wingnuts, but even their leaders have betrayed them. Mark Ames has the story:

Like the much more numerous Freepers, the mob at Pajamas Media is outraged because they have been betrayed. It’s not just that the liberals betrayed them, but that the leaders they’d followed — Fox News, right-wing bloggers, and the Republican elite who have been mobilizing their pitchfork fury — now find their savagery a liability, and they’re abandoning them. It’s the fury of having been played for a sucker — and the “real American” mob has been played for the biggest sucker in American history, as is clear from their sense of abandonment.

It is an incredible spectacle to behold: the Republican elite abandoning a 20-year narrative at the snap of a finger just to make sure that it is positioned well in the new Obama dynamic. The Republican elite has clearly decided that the “Real America” mob it had exploited had become a liability, but still it’s amazing how seamlessly and quickly it can throw its own audience overboard. Witness the smear campaign against the right-wing mob’s heroine, Sarah Palin, who is now being taken down by none other than Bill O’Reilly.

Fun as it is to see all those rageoids, queen bees and internet hard men waking up to discover they had just been thrown away like a day old condom, it’s also a bit worrying. These are the people who at every turn in their life have made the wrong choice; they’re not going to have any road to Damascus style conversion, see the light and become good Democrats. No, as documented by our good friends at Alicublog or Sadly, No, tif anything this experience is only going to harden their views, and having a legion of bitter, resentful, angry people around blaming Obama and the Democrats, as well as their erstwhile leaders for their own failures is not a recipe for happiness. We don’t need to look at the example of Weimar Germany to see how dangerous this situation could be, American history has a fair few examples of its own as well.