The election - the monkey wrench

It's past midnight here on the West coast, and I'm about go to sleep, so, I'm going to say something really quickly about the election. Wow. Really wow. Myself, I'm not super excited about the Democrats winning the House, and quite likely the Senate (it'll come down to the Virginia recount and Tester holding on to the lead in Montana). I'm not particularly aligned with either party, but at this point I'm mildly happy because I'm aiming for gridlock. I don't think our country is going in the right direction, or, more precisely, in any genuine direction. George W. Bush came into office in 2000 with principles, ethics and integrity, or so he said. I know of no evidence which suggests that he broke faith with his wife, as his predecessor did, but, he has broken his faith with the American people. In 2000 George W. Bush expressed less interest in foreign entanglements than Al Gore. And yet after 2001, when the horror of 9/11 was met with resolute action in Afghanistan, he has lost his way. I won't psychoanalyze what he was thinking, or not, or what propels the machinations which inevitably drove the Bush White House to invade Iraq. It happened, it's history, and so is George W. Bush's "legacy." Under his watch the government expanded, we became involved in needless foreign wars, and there was more showboating than substance on social issues. The contempt & disdain that this nation is subject to the world over will have ramifications well after this president leaves office. The deficit and unsustainable spending will have repercussions in all of our lives. It seems to me that somehow George W. Bush lost both compassion and conservatism in the last 3 years in the quixotic venture to turn Iraq into a Jeffersonian republic. Enough is enough. The well oiled Republican party machine needs to be stopped in its tracks, it isn't going where a party which sells itself as one of limited government and social conservatism should be going. The 1994 Republican revolution is history, and the current dispensation is rotten to the core. It took Democrats 50 years of being drunk on power to be thrown from their thrones, but it took Republicans 12 years. History moves ever faster, as Moore's law finds its expression in cultural change and the tempo of politics. Onward and upward? Who knows.

The Democrats do not bring a smile to my face. They are lovers of big government and righteous paternalism. It seems entirely likely than in the next 2 years they'll collude with our president in throwing the borders open to masses of future potential voters, a helot caste who will feed the flames of identity politics and class warfare. The multicultural managerial elite and the corporate oligarchs will be smile as the bulging pear-shaped American social system is replaced by a triangle with a large base and themselves at the pinnacle. I was born in a Third World country, and I might well just die in one, so I guess I best get a move on to make sure that I'm nicely ensconsed in the coming oligarchy. But that is the future, the danger down the generations must for the moment cede ground to the government abomination of the present. Sometimes the right hand needs the left, and two wrongs do make a right.

Perhaps one bright spot in my gloomy assessment is that now we have a woman third in line for the White House. Nancy Pelosi is testament to the fact that the American political elite does have room for those who aren't out of central casting, the Great White Male. And yet the reality is that to some extent this election was a matter of one cabal of white males passing the baton to another clique of white males. Some things never change even in quickening cultural maleston that is the American republic. Let's hope the Great White Fathers who take upon the charisma of leadership can guide our republic down a better path over the next few years....