The voters have voted and Barack Obama is president elect. I hope all my readers who voted for change get the sort of change you were looking for, but don’t count on it. Obama is all things to all voters, he is a mirror reflecting peoples aspirations and fears rather than actually standing for anything concrete. That is, anything besides raising your taxes and decreasing America’s military might. You think America’s position in the world will improve? I say get prepared for Carter Part II.
All I can tell you at this point is don’t blame me, I didn’t vote for him. I’ll tell you the same thing next year when you see your pay stubs and complain to me about it. I’ll tell the same thing when you look at your property taxes shoot through the roof. Don’t blame me, blame yourself. This is the change you were looking for, America. Now deal with it.
Sultan Knish looks at things a bit more philosophically and has this to say:
Today I unpacked my winter clothes in preparation for a long winter, and a long winter is coming if not of the thermometer, then of the soul. A man that represents not simply an opposing view but the view of those who oppose America and all it stands for, will sit in the Oval Office. Worse still he did not get there through a democratic election but through fraud, voter intimidation and every dirty trick culminating in a campaign that had little in common with conventional American politics and a great deal in common with the cults of personality cultivated by totalitarian dictators.
Our disappointment has come tonight. The disappointment of those Democratic party voters who are still of the party of Jefferson rather than the party of Ayers will come later and it will be far darker because we were innocent of it, while they will be complicit in all that he does. But we are not simply “Don’t Blame Me” voters. We did our best to fight against this and while that may be small comfort against what comes, it is important to remember that, just as it is remembered in every age the people who stood against the rise of evil and took no part in the mass madness that brings tyrants to power and overturns nations.
In a related issue, talk about opportune timing, William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn are set to publish a book exposing the ills of white supremacy. Not neo-fascist white supremacy but the sort of guilt laden excursions into identity politics which blame all the world’s problems on whitey. Described as “veteran political activists” by the publisher, Ayers and Dohrn argue white supremacy is the guiding ideology of the United States by pointing attention to the “unexamined bigotry” in “war policy and education.”
Didn’t you know we bombed Germany in the name of white pride. I wonder if Ayers or Dohrn are being considered as possible choices for Secretary of Education by Obama?
Here is a blurb:
White supremacy and its troubling endurance in American life is debated in these personal essays by two veteran political activists. Arguing that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days—and that it is still very much with us—the discussion points to unexamined bigotry in the criminal justice system, election processes, war policy, and education. The book draws upon the authors’ own confrontations with authorities during the Vietnam era, reasserts their belief that racism and war are interwoven issues, and offers personal stories about their lives today as parents, teachers, and reformers.
I can’t wait to read it…
The New Centrist 