Steelers Win!

HoHO! It’s the ol’ reverso-title trick! SHAZZAM!

So, yes, it is official, Obama has won the election. Currently, McCain is giving his concession speech, and I must say it’s one of the few concession speeches that I would actually describe as GOOD. Unfortunately for John, it’s the best speech he made during this entire campaign, which was part of the problem. The selection of an intellectually incurious end of days type as his running mate was a WORSE one of course (although, looking back, who the fuck else was he going to pick? Rudy ’9/11′ Giuliani? Mitt ‘Greasy Used Car Salesman’ Romney? Fred ‘Do I HAVE To Actually Campaign?’ Thompson?).

The truth is, I like John McCain…I’ve always liked John McCain. It’s been hard not to delight in his senatorship during the Bush years, as he took one opportunity after another to stick a dagger in Georgie Boy’s back (fueled partly by the fact he was horrendously smeared in his 2000 campaign vs. Dubya, which is part of the reason George came from behind to win the nomination). However, his kowtowing to the religious right has been nothing short of repulsive. Perhaps this loss will be the impetus for the Republican party to sit down and figure out where the fuck they go from here. They need to do that as badly as the Democrats did in 2000…of course, they then put it off, spent the 2004 election cycle whining about 2000, and promptly got their asses handed to them again.

This one is different, though. For the first time, the white college-educated class has appeared to vote primarily Democrat. They no longer feel represented by a party that, after 8 years of the incurious, spur-of-the-moment, ‘intellectual’-is-a-slur Dubya presidency had the gall to throw a gigantic spitwad of Palin at them and told them to just fucking like it. They already have completely lost the minority vote (including the Latino vote that has been Republican leaning in the past). They’ve lost the vote of women, who didn’t respond to a woman being thrown on the ticket (and it had to have been for appearances, though her ability to gain policy knowledge by proximity is impressive. Certainly, anyone would love to have a running mate who can seemingly act as a foreign policy vampire, sucking knowledge of other countries out of the thin band of air separating them from herself) when that woman’s words were a never-ending spiel of removal of abortion rights and abstinence only sex education (which, considering she need look only across the goddamn dinner table to see the ineffectiveness of THAT in preventing teenage pregnancy, really points out what a thickheaded twit she truly is). They never had the youth vote, since young people aren’t tending to be worried about protecting vast fortunes they have not had a chance to accrue.

The Republicans have too long been the one trick pony of fear and anger as the entire motivating factor behind voting for them, and I’m glad to see that no longer working. I think part of the reason McCain never really seemed ‘on’ during this campaign is because he has always worked in office as a truly bipartisan, inclusive member of government. Unfortunately, his party has forgotten how to run that sort of campaign, and they tried to turn him in to a firebreathing beast, which just doesn’t work. Certainly, he needs to take some blame for allowing himself to be puppetized in such a manner, but the bigger culprit is the party machinery. Karl Rove and his jackass followers pretty much have to be cast aside now, because the demographics are going younger and more progressive, and this bullshit doesn’t work anymore.

Hell, you KNOW Republicans have screwed something up when more and more active duty and retired MILITARY are voting against them. Funny how soldiers don’t like constantly having deployments and enlistments ‘extended’ because their president was either too stupid or too timid to slap down his sub-moronic defense minister who was convinced he was a big enough genius to run the whole fucking show, including AFTER the war. So, hey, why keep any of those fancy plans the other departments had cooked up with research? Nope, we’ll send in enough troops for the conflict, but not enough for the aftermath, running around without proper armor and with no orders for what they are supposed to do when the initial combat is over and the government overthrown. Brilliant! Then, we’ll CUT THEIR BENEFITS (McCain supported doing that, by the way, which cost him BIG TIME when some of the military bloggers pointed it out to people.), and keep underfunding their medical care to the point that it becomes a source of national shame when the truth of how practically nonexistent their level of care really is. What? You mean, they’re a little PEEVED because of this? Who coulda seen THAT coming!

The Republican party has completely lost it’s way. It used to be about cutting government spending (aside from military), cutting government size, and never, EVER getting involved in anything that could be referred to as nation building (which was often the reason given for not being involved in UN peacekeeping forces…a desire to not be dragged in to long term postings that could be seen that way). Can you honestly say THAT is the case anymore? The government has grown even more bloated, and spends a fortune more than it did prior to Bush. And if Iraq isn’t an exercise in nation building I don’t know what the fuck it is. The majority of base Republicans are not Armageddon-obsessed (the end of the world, not the awful movie that made audiences beg for the end of the world) open-the-wallet retards, yet that’s the kind of government they got. They aren’t happy about it. Most centrist Republicans voted Obama, or didn’t vote at all.

With luck, it WILL find it’s way back to rationality. And I really do hope it does, for the same reasons that I’m glad the Dems did NOT win absolute control of the House and Senate that would have allowed them to basically run any bill through that they wished…one party controlling everything is not healthy. Why do you think the Republicans GOT so arrogant, got to the point they felt they could feed the country and world whatever they wanted, and fuck you if you didn’t like it? Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Besides, it’s not like the Dem-controlled Senate and House of the past 2 years has been any better than the Repub-controlled disasters prior to it. It’s been just as ineffective, and just as big a logjam and mess.

Where it goes from here, who knows? How long a grace period does this government, and this president, get? The country is a disaster, and there are no easy answers or easy ways out of anything at all. Bush sent the country down the crapper, but it’s not like the Clinton White House doesn’t bear some responsibility for this shit. They’re actually the ones who signed the bill in ’98 making the official attitude of the US towards Iraq one of war, and the stated goal of the country the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. They’re the ones who started the whole system of ridiculous home loans that has sent the real estate sector in to a death spiral. And Al Gore knew ALL the loopholes in holding on to stock options while in government (and making sure those options’ value increase while in office) long before Cheney and Rumsfeld did the same.

At any rate, it will be nice to hear a presidential speech that doesn’t seem like it was written on the back of a Hardee’s napkin three minutes prior to being delivered. And it will be nice to see a vice president who doesn’t seem to be cackling like some dictatorial overlord every moment he spends on camera. And let’s HOPE these two put together a cabinet better than the one Dubya and Dicky boy did, though that really wouldn’t be hard…I think you could find better people than Rumsfeld, Rice, Perle, Wolfowitz and Woolsey just by grabbing five random people waiting in line at lunch time in any DMV anywhere in the country.

I’m just babbling on and on now, and realized I really have no idea how the Hell to bring this to a close, so I’m just going to settle for the abrupt.