http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/...obama_victory/

On 05 Nov 2008 22:21:57 GMT, "Mr.Spock" wrote:

wrote in news:fzoQk.234635$1p1.65184@en-nntp-
08.dc1.easynews.com:


http://www

????


Don't go there unless you like malware.

Malware?? Mr. Spock, that's clumsy sabotage. See below
the full article referenced in my earlier email.

I just thought it would be more economical, space-wise,
to give the URL.

As a graduate of the McCain/Palin campaign's*** school of lying,
cheating, misrepresenting, couldn't they have taught you to be
more, uh...sophisticated about it?

***NOTE: I said "campaign" not McCain himself, because I don't think
he would have run such a sick campaign if his ***hole managers hadn't
persuaded the poor old man that lying and distorting attacks was the
way to beat a polite opponent who refused to sink to their depths.


http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/...ory/print.html


Here's the full article:


Taking our country back
Obama's victory was a triumph not just for Democrats but for the
American spirit and the world.
By Gary Kamiya

Nov. 05, 2008 |

Today the embattled American people stood, and fired a shot heard
'round the world.

Only rarely does one know that one is experiencing history while it
happens. Barack Obama's victory is one of those occasions. This
amazing day marks a decisive change, not just in America's politics
but in its soul. It announces the arrival of a new America, of a
multitudinous, multihued people whose time has come and who have
demanded a politics worthy of them. Their voice echoes across the land
from Stone Mountain to Seattle, and its message rings out loud and
clear: We have taken our country back.

We have taken it back from the mean-spirited demagogues who were
willing to tear the American people apart to stay in power.

We have taken it back from the apostles of selfishness who pretend
naked greed is noble individualism.

We have taken it back from the deluded hawks who cavalierly sent our
youth off to die in a war that should never have been fought.

We have taken it back from the incompetent officials who lived up to
their antigovernment credo by bungling everything they touched.

We have taken it back from the reactionaries whose intolerance,
xenophobia and religious zealotry have been encouraged by a distorted
Republican Party for far too long.

Some will say that this election didn't prove that much. They will
argue that considering Bush's unpopularity, the war and the financial
crisis, this race should never have been even competitive. They will
say the race was tied in September and only an inept McCain campaign
and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression tilted it
toward Obama. They will say that America is still a center-right
country.

But those arguments are like dead trees standing in the path of a
spring-snow torrent. A great change has come upon America.

Watching Obama speak after his victory, I was reminded again of the
subtle and profound depths of this man. It was a subdued speech, on
the surface almost disappointing, but its eloquent restraint spoke
volumes about not just Obama's character but what we could call,
harking back to another age, his taste. He chose not to mount the
messianic pulpit, knowing that if he did he would alienate many
Americans. Because of his complex and hard-earned comfort with his own
racial identity, he is a self-reflective man, a man of many parts.

We have seen his facets. Obama can parry and thrust with Hillary
Clinton. He can be hip with Jon Stewart. He can speak eloquently of
race, as he did in his victory speech, without foregrounding his own
race. He can reach out to those who didn't vote for him, and his
native sensitivity makes his words believable. His rhetoric is soaring
but never self-aggrandizing: He is too confident in his own identity
to need the fix of adulation. A leader with these qualities, a black
man whose racial consciousness is so evolved as to be unreadable, has
the ability to take America places it has never been before.

The election of Obama marks a change in what it means to be an
American. It is a change that is as true to the essence of
conservatism as it is to liberalism, for it has its roots in a
generous vision of civic life that both share. And all Americans will
benefit from it.

The Obama triumph means the Reagan revolution is over. The
antigovernment, antitax, trickle-down, every-man-for-himself ethos
collapsed with a whimper during the catastrophic presidency of George
W. Bush, and Obama's election put it out of its misery. By electing
Obama, the American people have emphatically rejected the selfishness,
masquerading as freedom and rugged individualism, that has been the
calling card of the American right wing since Barry Goldwater. In its
place, they are calling not just for a new and expanded vision of
government's role in American life but for a new vision of American
society.

That vision represents a return to the idea that Americans are bound
together by more than just a flag, that we are all part of the same
community, and that the strength of a community, like the strength of
a family, is measured by its members' commitment to each other. The
America envisioned by Obama is one in which the privileged care about
the plight of the less fortunate because that care, that solidarity,
is an inseparable part of who we are as Americans.

And that solidarity extends beyond our borders, to the people of the
world. More than our wealth and power, this is what has made America a
beacon of hope across the globe. After 9/11, Bush had an opportunity
to reach out to the rest of the world. In his arrogance and folly, he
chose to bully it instead. The election of Obama signifies that
America is rejoining the world. How telling it was that in his speech,
Obama said that America would defeat not our evil terrorist enemies,
the rhetoric we have grown used to, but "those who would tear the
world down." His is a larger, calmer vision, one that does not play
into the hands of terrorists by exaggerating their threat.

One of the many remarkable things about Obama's campaign is that even
its slickest, most professional, most Machiavellian messages -- and
how marvelous that Democrats should be slicker, more professional,
more Machiavellian than Republicans! -- always communicated the man's
essential idealism. Obama's 30-minute infomercial is a case in point.
That film was essentially the story of three struggling American
families. It was crafted to appeal to voters who would relate to those
families, and clearly its main purpose was to persuade them to vote
for Obama out of self-interest: If Obama helped the families in the
film, he could help them, too. But what is noteworthy about the film,
and indeed about Obama's entire campaign, is that it assumed that
Americans are capable of going beyond self-interest, that what happens
to that family in Ohio matters to us.

For a nation starved for inspiration, that implicit call was like
water in a desert. For eight years, and for many years before that,
Americans have been told that nothing is required of them as citizens
except to make and spend money and jump in fear of terrorism when
prodded. Those who tried in their personal lives to take steps to
alleviate the greatest threat facing the planet, global warming, were
derided by Vice President Cheney as practicing "personal virtue." The
country was thirsty for more.

And in his speech, Obama asked us to do more. In words that recalled
Winston Churchill's famous declaration in the darkest days of WWII
that "I have nothing to offer except blood, toil, tears and sweat," he
spoke of "remaking this nation the only way it has been done in
America for 221 years -- block by block, brick by brick, calloused
hand by calloused hand." He called on us to make sacrifices. Above
all, he called on us to come together. "So let us summon a new spirit
of patriotism, of service and responsibility where each of us resolves
to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but
each other."

His words revealed the gaping fissure in conservatism's moral vision.
Conservatives claim to be the upholders of a threatened traditional
morality. But their economic ideology is inherently amoral. Their
refusal to see American society as a community implicitly rejects both
the Christian injunction to "love thy neighbor as thyself," and the
oldest moral commandment in the world, the Golden Rule. A party and
movement that have rejected the idea that its members should care
about their poorer neighbors, or simply denies that the less
privileged are our neighbors, is one that has lost its moral compass.

The radical individualism of the right subverts not only its claim to
be ethical and religious, but its claim to be patriotic. On what basis
can patriotism be established, except on a communal one? Patriotism,
if it is to be more than an empty slogan, means making sacrifices for
a cause greater than oneself. That moral principle is the same one
that underlies governmental policies to reduce inequality, such as
progressive taxation. By limiting its vision of community and altruism
to military service, the right has hollowed out its own ostensible
ethics, and fostered an ethos of selfishness and irresponsibility that
subverts the very patriotism and religion whose virtues it so emptily
extols. "United We Stand" was never anything more than a bumper
sticker under Bush. The party of "family values" embraced an
I've-got-mine-Jack ideology that no responsible parent would teach
their children.

Americans were aware of this, even if half-consciously. And so Obama's
victory in part reflects Americans' deep, if not fully conscious,
desire to create a more ethical society, one in which individualism
thrives but is not set against conscience, in which capitalism drives
the economy but is not allowed complete license, in which patriotism
means more than flag waving. A real society. In the words scrawled on
a piece of parchment 236 years ago, and which Obama referred to in his
speech, "a more perfect union."

Polls show that almost 90 percent of Americans, a record number,
believe that the country is on the wrong track. Some of that response
is no doubt driven purely by pocketbook issues. But everything we know
about the American people -- and the results of this election confirm
it -- tells us that their distress has deeper origins. Americans are
aware, at some profound level, that they have lost their way. They
recognize that this is no longer the country that came together to
defeat Hitler, or struggled to overcome the injustice of racism, or
whose plainspoken idealism and optimism inspired the admiration of the
world. Beneath the neon glitter of our consumer-driven,
media-saturated society, beneath the wealth and the spectacle, is a
sterility, a purposelessness.

And this is why Obama's victory is a victory not just for the left but
for all Americans. The majority of Americans voted for Obama not
because he was a "liberal," but because he promised to take America
back to what it once was, and carry us forward to where we want to go.

President-elect Obama will face an almost unbelievably daunting set of
challenges. He inherits an economy in deep crisis and a nation whose
international reputation is in tatters. He must figure out how to
responsibly extricate our troops from Iraq, and come to terms with the
fact that his hawkish campaign rhetoric about winning a military
victory in Afghanistan is misguided. He must take decisive steps to
address the transcendental international issue of our time, global
warming. He must remake America's decaying infrastructure, using
deficit spending to rebuild the country, and raise employment without
saddling us with so crippling a debt that we can never repay it. He
must tiptoe through a domestic political minefield to resolve the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the greatest source of Arab-Muslim anger
at the U.S., and the inextricably related issue of how to deal with
Iran. He must begin to repair the grievous damage Bush did to the
Constitution. He must try to rectify the miserable status of so many
black Americans. And he must do all this in the face of a rump GOP
that is bitterly opposed to everything he stands for.

No one expects miracles from Obama. It took years for America to dig
itself into this hole, and it will take years to dig out of it. But
Americans chose a candidate who has the tools to succeed. Forget
ideology. Obama possesses qualities that are more important: brains
and character. In professional sports, scouts talk about drafting "the
best available athlete." Obama was the best available mind. And
Americans chose him.

And they chose a black man. All Americans, whatever their political
views or party affiliation, should feel an enormous sense of pride
today. The bitter legacy of America's enslavement and unjust treatment
of black people remains. But Nov. 4, 2008, will go down in history as
the day that, on the highest symbolic plane, the Rev. Martin Luther
King's dream that one day his children would be judged "not by the
color of their skin but by the content of their character" ceased to
be a dream and became a reality. Fifty-four years after the Supreme
Court ruled that separate schools for black and white children were
illegal, 33 years after the Voting Rights Act was passed, and just 31
years after the last miscegenation laws were struck down, a majority
of Americans chose a black man to be their leader. How many of us
thought that we would live to see this day? The tears and the laughter
and the disbelieving exultation across America give the answer.

In his classic defense of free speech, "Areopagitica," John Milton
famously wrote, "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation
rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her
invincible locks." After eight nightmarish years of Bush, Milton's
words feel like a benediction.

For Obama's triumph represents the awakening of the American spirit,
one that runs through our entire history. Eight dreadful years cannot
kill it.

It is the spirit that animated the blacksmiths and farmers and clerks
of Massachusetts and Virginia and Georgia, the despised rabble who
everyone knew would turn and run when facing the British army, but who
stood their ground at Concord and paid for a nation with their blood.

It is the spirit that inspired the soldiers, "sinewy with
unconquerable resolution," as Walt Whitman called them, who died at
Gettysburg and Antietam.

It is the spirit of their president, who wrote a 10-sentence document
that, if no other evidence of the United States existed, would prove
that this nation had the stuff of greatness in it.

It is the spirit that brought the people of an impossibly diverse,
far-flung country together, every American part of the same team, men
and women, professors and ditch diggers, a mighty democratic
brotherhood that defeated the most dangerous tyrant in history.

It is the spirit that led the Freedom Riders to risk their lives to
give their fellow Americans the civil rights they had been shamefully
denied.

It is the spirit of hope.

America is in for a long, tough fight. But we can now begin to fight
it together.

On Nov 5, 7:40*pm, wrote:

snip

Enough, already. The campaign's over. Obama won. Can we get back now
to important things (for us) like damp basements, funky electrics, and
easier ways to keep the palazzo from crumbling from under us?

Joe

Joe wrote in news:6252517e-10db-4083-ae7b-fa655e46d5c0
@a3g2000prm.googlegroups.com:

On Nov 5, 7:40*pm, wrote:

snip

Enough, already. The campaign's over. Obama won. Can we get back now
to important things (for us) like damp basements, funky electrics, and
easier ways to keep the palazzo from crumbling from under us?

Joe


Don't forget the outlets oozing with green fluid.

On Nov 6, 7:22*pm, Joe wrote:
On Nov 5, 7:40*pm, wrote:

snip

Enough, already. The campaign's over. Obama won. Can we get back now
to important things (for us) like damp basements, funky electrics, and
easier ways to keep the palazzo from crumbling from under us?

Joe

Maybe if we all spread this around? Might help to spread oil on the
troubled waters.



In the spirit of reconciliation with my Republican friends and
neighbors, I offer the following poem....

The election is over, the results are now known.
The will of the people has clearly been shown.
We should show by our thoughts and our words and our deeds
That unity is just what our country now needs.
Let's all get together. Let bitterness pass.
I'll hug your elephant.
You kiss my ass.



Harry K

Let's just hope for the best.
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