These are my election notes, written about 24 hours after Obama defeated Romney. It is my first "diary" on the Kos. I assume I will foul up the posting process so I want to start with a recent but not timely piece....
I had another dream about lions at the door, But they weren’t half as frightening as they were before. Wondering Where the Lions Are, Bruce Cockburn, (used with permission)
There is a lot of blood on the floor over at the American Pravda called Fox News this week and all the air is dead air. A lot of phones are not being answered. Many trophy wives have taken their children away, to the safe places only women know about.
A padded wagon load of GOP-funding Lord Fauntleroys just woke up on what they thought would be Christmas day, only to discover that the adults had crapped in a box and left it under the tree for them on the way to work. A man whom Fox News repeatedly assailed as the least capable politician in American history personally destroyed the entire Republican party before the polls were even closed in states worth a third of the Electoral College. It turned out to be just another day for a President and a White House defined by fighting off two or three horsemen of the apocalypse a week.
It has become clear that the Limbaugh nationalists really thought the inconvenient peons from the rest of the human race would just disappear in the smoke from this election and leave them all the technology; all the treasure; an eternal celebrity of heroism and the thanks of a genuflecting nation. The Republican campaign brought their usual terrible swift sword of fear mongering along but they also brought a cresting wave of financial tyranny never before witnessed in the free world. The Republican money machine invested in every implement you could find in a modern political toolbox, except one. The dénouement was an ugly moment of Pollice Verso in the Gladiator’s arena as the professional candidate all but begged for mercy on live global television from the man he had so often called the stupidest President in history. It turned out he needed time get that last tool, a concession speech.
Make no mistake about what just happened kids. The Permanent Campaign has been stopped in its tracks. Romney's dreams of leading a unified, three branch kingdom in America were crushed, like so many empty beer cans behind a Toledo union hall. In the end, the entire RoveStaffel was quickly stunned without fanfare, like mad-cows on an assembly line and dragged from the studios.
The GOP machine spent so long saying Obama is incompetent that they allowed themselves to actually believe it. Not for nothing, but The Obama Campaign’s “ground game” (much of which was intentionally hidden in places like barber shops and florists) revealed a President who is undeniably one of the most, sophisticated, intelligent and competent organizational political leaders in American history.
In any case, the GOP must now face a world in which their Utopia cannot be sub leased in the marketplace of other people’s liberty. America’s right wing royalty has been turned at the ramparts. They will complain with great rancor that they were ended by a ten foot tall stuffed yellow bird; the largest hurricane in recorded history, and a fatherless black man (who never even inherited a penny). They will eventually realize, too late, that it is all true - but that the outcome reflects far more poorly upon their honor and leadership ability than it does on the bird’s. They will, at last be able to truthfully blame something bad on Obama - their own destruction.
A lot of Republicans are waking up today having wagered on sin and lost enough money to pay their honest taxes in full for a decade. They short-sold America’s moral destiny but when the dice stopped rolling there was no “come”. They will be paying the political Vig on their gamble for many seasons of shame to come. These are arrogant, spoiled men who get what they want and make enemies of any child who refuses to have their candy stolen. These men like winning and by “winning” we mean “taking”. They have never failed to get exactly what they want, and they never, ever use the experience of failure to contemplate their moral smallness in the world.
The power takers and gold lickers of the corporate GOP have stopped taking calls from a candidate who is already being mumbled about as “Old What’s-His-Name”. The secret service detail vanished into the night and the Blackberrys are already out of service. What the serious players are processing now is whom they will target for revenge destruction. They made treasonous threats to collapse America’s economy if they were not given control of the government. They might make good on the threats and destroy America in a suicide pact with the same economic devil they claimed last week to protect us from. (Probably not though as it will hurt their profits and they are starting the new year a billion dollars behind). In any case, they will need something more specific in the interim. They will need to see, and to smell, the blood of human sacrifice flowing into the gutter stops, and they will need it soon.
The first backwards looking reality that will be scraped off the abattoir walls, where the Republican party just ate it’s own entrails, is that giving a billion dollars to a guy called “Bush’s Brain” might not have been the smartest way to try and repair the spiked generation of joyless carnage that “Bush’s Presidency” laid upon American conservatism. This was clearly the most monstrously historic election in your lifetime, and the first real result is that Karl Rove is going out with the next tide, chained to a Viking funeral pyre like the screaming widow of a slain king.
The Republicans commanded theater in their campaigns and they will demand theater in their downfall. A lot of wealthy men just gave about ten people over a billion dollars cash to defeat a man they mocked as an empty chair. Obama painted the walls with their livers.
They will need Karl Rove to lay on the table of their last feast, stone cold naked with an apple jammed into his mouth. They will need many others brought before the dock as well, and the list is already being prepared. Limbaugh is on it and perhaps Murdoch himself. They are already welding their gates shut from the inside. Soon enough we will hear the slobbered grunts and the thrashing sobs of self-torn flesh. They will call each other many names and they will, especially, call Mr. Rove many things in the coming weeks, and months. And years. But they can only and ever call their vanquisher one thing for the rest of their lives:
And that is "President Obama”.
Ride for the High Country...