The End of the Beginning

(I wrote this on election night 2008, I thought it was as good a piece of political commentary as anyone on TV was providing that night, also a bit of homage to Hunter S Thompson)


Rumblings in the Heartland:a call for change...Fear and Loathing in Phoenix...The Banshee screams for the GOP...McCain's final bad beat in the poker game of politics...The final death throes of Idiot America...and more importantly--Now what?


At the end of the day, they count up the votes and may the best man win. That's a saying as old as politics itself. Maybe as old as John McCain looked last night at 11:30 when he finally gave up in the last election of his career. The irony that he spent the hours leading up to his defeat in the Barry Goldwater Suite at the Arizona Biltmore weren't lost on many veteran political watchers. It was almost like Mr Conservative himself was present in the room, still hanging on to hope that Extremism in the Defense of Liberty is No Vice. But knowing in his heart that it may not be a Vice, but it doesn't fall under the category of Virtue either.
And make no mistake, Virtue is not John McCain's strong suit. His resume of virtues lacks a lot of important qualities--fidelity, charm and grace among three I can think of off the top of my head.
He'll go to his grave wondering if he'd only not let himself be talked into having that Redneck Shrew on his ticket, he might have had a fighting chance. Or if he hadn't been wondering about which Plebe he was going to haze, instead of paying attention in Macro-Economics class at Annapolis.

Sometimes you get the Bear, and sometimes the Bear mauls you into an unrecognizable mass of flesh. And that pretty much sums up the Election of '08. Books will be written about the colossal sea-change in the landscape of American voting patterns in the years to come, but at the end of time, it will still come down to the fact that a lot of people under the age of 30 weren't ready to have their Grandpa define the next 4 years of their life.

Veterans Day will mark the 90th anniversary of the end of The War to End All Wars, as the old-timers liked to call World War 1, and at times it seemed like McCain was playing a strategy pulled straight out of that war in the conduct of his campaign. Trench Warfare, Chemical warfare and full-on mass frontal assaults on a well entrenched enemy all have frightening parallels to this Election year.
Barack Obama's arrival into the fray was a lot like Black Jack Pershing's arrival in France with the American Expeditionary Force, declaring "Lafayette, we are here". It turned that war in the favor of the Allies in the same way that Obama's groundswell of grass roots organizing did, forging impressionable young people into a crack political unit that turned over the Old Guard.

McCain's tunnel vision in his quest for the Presidency has almost guaranteed that "his" people won't be in control of the GOP for much longer. Much like Goldwater's loss led to a top down purge of the party in the 60's, I suspect that this loss will force a serious re-appraisal of what direction the Republicans will take as a minority party. The fact that incumbent Republican Senators were trying to get on the right side of Obama voters in the last weeks of the campaign does not bode well for McCains continued leadership of the Party.

As for Obama, what will his term bring for us? I couldn't say. I hope that we begin to repair some of the horrible mistrust that average Americans have for all of the instruments of government--how we have abandoned ideas that are the foundation of our way of life. I hope he can reverse the erosion of civil liberties and Rule of Law. I hope he can break the Siege Mentality of the bureaucracy that President Skippy has cultivated for 7 years.

I'd have voted for Slobadan Milosevic, Robert Mugabe, or anyone else who would've said that they would do the opposite of everything that our Child-President has accomplished or not accomplished in the last 8 years. In the end, McCain never came out and said any such thing, as he was never going to do anything of the sort. How could he? You can't make chicken salad out of chicken sh^t.

Selah