Barak Hussein Obama

Barak Hussein Obama is the president-elect of the United States of America. It's difficult to add to the outpouring of emotional exuberance that has come from all parts of the country, the continent, the world. It's been so long that we've forgotten what this tastes like. Tastes like real freedom, real progress.

The eight bitter years in the wilderness have been made more difficult by right wing triumphalism and Democratic Party cravenness.

When they cheated out their "victory" in 2000, the Bush extremists brought bulldozers and paper shredders with them to Washington. Just as GWB "was born on third base and acts like he hit a triple," so, too, their administration had to cheat voters and work the refs to be declared victors, and then acted like they'd won in a landslide.

I won't try to capture the extent of the destruction - I don't know enough words. And they're not done yet - there are many endangered species to stop protecting between now and January.

But over the course of those eight failed years, they never stopped celebrating. You may recall that the 2004 inaugural parties were lavishly funded by the corporations who knew their profit margins were about to soar - and that there was no legal limit on giving inaugural parties.

The distasteful excess of the Republicans should not be forgotten. They had their way for so many years - to what end?

Regulation-free markets proved that there is no cap on rightist greed, and that in no sense can Capitalists be trusted to 'police themselves.' Consider your local grocer, free of all regulation; no cash register, haggling over every melon - and worse: colluding with the warehouser to inflate the cost and value of lemons. And yet Wall Street fat cats were supposed to restrain themselves from taking guaranteed profits by making high-stakes gambles and pyramid schemes with your money?

What did they get from selling the store? They got the socialism they feared the most. President Obama will be the one to use the $700 billion in bailout money. Not Hank Paulson, who has plenty of money himself and has no interest in seeing more money get spread around to middle-class chumps. Those Chumps just elected their own guy.

We all got record debt. Try explaining that to your grandkids who will still be paying it. I wonder, if you proposed a scheme like the Bush racket to decent people, would anybody take it? If you were offered this deal, would you take it?

Here's the deal:

"You can have as much money as you like to live a lavish rich-and-famous lifestyle. You can party day and night, you can fly private jets to even more private islands, pay for all your friends and family (who will be offered the same deal), and never stop until the day you die.

But...

Your kids will owe that debt, and they themselves will not be able to borrow. As many years or generations as it takes, the debt will never go away until it's paid."

Any takers? Because that's the Repub tune that the insiders have been dancing to since 2000. They are betting the future of their own progeny that the U.S. will never again be a meritocracy. That is, all fortunes will be old fortunes. Big money will stay within the class.

You know, on the plantation.

Otherwise, how does it make sense to wreck the economy and ring up $10 trillion in debt? The answer is that it doesn't make sense and never did. The Bush class has not only been crushing the poor and middle class, they've been spending their inheritance. Screw you, junior!

The president-elects background put lie to any notion of an American aristocracy. As much as 'King' George Bush tried to install one, Americans have rejected the notion along with the faux royalty.

We also got proof positive for all time that "Trickle-down economics" is a lie and a failure. It was a lie and a failure when Reagan tried it, and its even more so today. It sold the snake oil idea that as the rich and corporations were given more tax cuts, they would spend and invest the money so it would "Trickle Down" to the poor and middle class. It was tried over years at the highest level of government. The executive and legislative bodies both embraced it under iron-fisted Repub rule - and it destroyed the place. It was always the happy-face mask on the serial killer of "Starve the Beast" economics. The Right Wing Extremists, as always, knew that they could never sell "Starve" so they sold the gentle-sounding "Trickle" instead.

Their idea has always been to give all the government cash away to the rich and to corporations (especially defense contractors) so that the "Beast" (the federal government) would be "Starved" (no money to spend on you poor plebeians out there, so government is forced to shrink). But the irony is that the "Starve" philosophy didn't even work on its own terms.

The core of greed and sloth that lives in all Rightists couldn't ever give up their free lunch. So when the taxes were cut and the Beast was getting hungry, they just started borrowing. And it was their borrowing that showed just was evil, soulless creatures they are. See, they have run up trillions of dollars of debt for war and 'Bridges to Nowhere' and just flat out gifts of greenbacks - not to mention foreign wars of choice. But not a dime for health care. Not a dime for food or jobs or single parents or day-care or the environment or infrastructure or anything else that the vast bulk of the country actually needs.

And then they killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East for no reason at all. I wish it were more complicated than that, but that's the whole thing: And then they killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East for no reason at all.

And if you listened to all their presidential candidates - not just McCain, but the whole nasty lot of them - what were they saying? "More tax cuts." "Less regulation." "Wars are good and were needed."

No. No. No no no no. No more. No more insanity dressed up in the robes of power. No more Supreme Court Justices who see no limits to the Executive (somehow unable to fathom Article II despite their many years on the bench). No more TORTURE! No more rendition! No more thugs dressed up as Americans doing horrible things around the globe in my name and yours. No more!

I remember reading an interview several years ago with a Special Forces General (before Bush ruined our military with over-use and by promoting the highest ranks politically). He said (and I paraphrase) 'to kill bin Laden, what we should have done was drop a four-man Delta Force team into Tora Bora. They would have either killed him or we wouldn't have heard from them again, and would have tried again when we had better intel.'

I read that and thought: 'that's the America I used to know - canny, capable. Using force wisely and only applying what we need to get the job done. Even knowing what the job is.' Have we known what the 'job is' in Afghanistan? In Iraq?

The change we need is to go back to being the one who's canny and clever and capable, not the mean drunk falling over tables and chucking drinks into our friends faces.

Let the Obama era begin!