I like it. Of course, we'll have to find someone else to make jokes about, now that Miss Alaska is ... er, burned bread.

"Set a new course. There's coffee in that nebula." -- Capt. Janeway, Star Trek: Voyager

Congratulations America!

Quote from a Canadian guy on my bus this morning; "Good on America, it's like they passed an IQ test!"

Sort of back-handed, but I guess a compliment, eh.

Can't say we don't deserve it. Along that line, here's the latest from The Onion:


Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress

I remember back in the 70s, we used to debate about whether America would be ready first for a woman or a black person to be president. Now we know. Truthfully, it's a lot sooner than I would have thought for either of them.

After having lived through the past 8 years, however, all I can say is, "it's about time."

One point, however ... The Onion referred to Obama as a "progressive", and the McCain campaign repeatedly called him a radical or liberal. Actually, he isn't. Obama is a political moderate, which IMO is just what we need right now.

"Set a new course. There's coffee in that nebula." -- Capt. Janeway, Star Trek: Voyager

Good last line, Kitty. Among the things we are sick of is extremism, and if the new regime is going to succeed it wil have to make carefully considered moves and not go off half-cocked.

A few interesting viewpoints have surfaced.

On "America bashing" and foreign relations (not too sure I agree with "Bush is Australia's friend" though); It's farewell to our great friend Bush | The Australian

A poll indicates 84% of us (so far) think Obama will improve the reputation of the US.

An angle on the race element: Janet Albrechtsen Blog | The Australian

I've lost the link now but there was also an amusingly satirical item announcing how, since McCain won the presidency, there would be changes - for example "fossil fuel" would become "creationist carbon".

Having read the blog article you linked to, I have to say the blogger sounds a lot like our neo-conservative US political media "pundits" ... mostly a lot of hot air, presenting incorrect information as fact, with an attitude of "poor us, look how badly we're being treated by those mean liberal elitists", but with no real conception of what is really going on.

For example, this:

No, Sarah Palin was decried because she was a religious fundie fanatic airhead who wanted to conquer the world for Jesus, was an embarrassment to womankind and couldn't govern her way out of a paper bag. Even top Republican officials admitted publicly that Palin was not ready to be president, and that's the job of the vice president.


I am not aware of any "political orthodoxy" that said in advance that Palin was going to play into the racism of the American voters. When McCain named her as his running mate, I was willing to give her a chance, and I suspect most of us were.

The fact is that she came out of the gate playing into the fears and insecurities of a certain group of Americans (the Republican Party's base), and some of those fears are indeed racially-based. That is a fact, and that was her standard modus operandi. Divide and conquer, us against them, they're dangerous and out to get you, etc. At the end, that's all the McCain campaign seemed to have. Fortunately it didn't work.


I'm not sure what to say to that, except to laugh. Almost 64 million people voted for Obama. Most of them were white, and many of them live in traditionally conservative areas of the country, including the Southern states of Virginia and Florida. I doubt seriously that most of them voted that way because Obama is black. We have much more serious things to worry about right now than ideological posturing.

I am sure that some people did vote for Obama because of his race. Many voted against him for the same reason. But most of us voted for him because we have been losing hope, losing faith in America and in our future.

IMO, the main reason this election was historically significant was not because of Obama's race, but because it connotes a sea change in Americans' value system. The beauty of this election is that we voted for the person we thought would do the better job of leading us out of this mess and into the future, regardless of what his race is.

One has to wonder what this blogger's real problem is. *whine whine whine* . "Poor me, poor me, poor me. Those liberals are picking on us. Mum, he's looking at me. Make him stop looking at me."

I know that there are many people who live their lives with a major sense of grievance, perceiving themselves as helpless victims and making sure everyone knows it. (Some of them are people making millions of dollars a year in income, freaking out because now they might have to pay taxes like the rest of us.) But I have hope now that we are turning away from allowing that kind of low-level attitude to govern our world. Well, we'd damn well better. It's getting tiresome and hasn't been getting us anywhere, fast.

[/rant]

Oh, and to end on a happy note,

Great line. I'm going to remember that one.

"Set a new course. There's coffee in that nebula." -- Capt. Janeway, Star Trek: Voyager

That blog was posed as an interesting viewpoint from the Antipodes - where most people don't consider Bush as a friend of this country! I thought the comment about voting for Obama because he was black might just possibly apply to a few of the PC fanatics but I think the election indicated a bit more than that - as you say, a lot voted for him. They can't all be PC freaks... can they...?

People are afraid. They are afraid of losing their jobs, their life savings, and their homes. They are afraid of their children not having adequate medical care, or of being sent to Iraq and maimed for life or killed for no good reason. Some of us are also very concerned about global warming and the degradation of the environment, and what that means for our survival as a species.

Our world is changing, and the future is very uncertain. This is the reality. If some right wing fanatics want to believe we forgot all about that and just voted in order to be PC ... well, let's just say their heads are somewhere other than in reality. (Clue: it's a really dark place, and they have to be contortionists to get there. )

"Set a new course. There's coffee in that nebula." -- Capt. Janeway, Star Trek: Voyager

Until the outcome of this election, I was under the opinion that most Americans lived with their heads up there 24/7.

Yes, that gigantic noise you heard on November 4th was a collective removal of heads from the dark place.

Seriously, though, I don't think that "recto-cranial inversion", as a friend of mine used to call it, is limited to Americans. We just seemed to have gotten lost there for a while.

Here's something else I just came across, which further illustrates that what happened yesterday goes way beyond Barack Obama. The presidential election was only one of many going on all across the country. Essentially, the US is turning Democratic. Click here (link) for a map that shows it clearly.

The Republican party has gained ground in the Appalachian-Ozarks area that stretches from western Virginia, across southern Tennessee and northern Alabama-Mississippi, into Arkansas and Oklahoma and parts of Texas and Louisiana. That's pretty much it. The Democrats are gaining ground in the rest of the country. As the article linked to says, that means the Republican party is becoming a regional party, with an extremely limited base comprised of a geographical area that is "a political enclave with distinct cultural and social characteristics from the rest of the country."

(If you'll recall from my other posts here at IaBT, that area is where my ancestors came from in the rural Deep South, the heart of the "Old Confederacy". This shows exactly why I had to leave that area of the country. It had become so oppressive for me to be around that kind of mindset.)

Also, the younger generation of voters, who turned out in record numbers for this election, went overwhelmingly with Obama and the Democratic candidates.

So this is something that goes way beyond "political correctness".

"Set a new course. There's coffee in that nebula." -- Capt. Janeway, Star Trek: Voyager