Friday, November 07, 2008

The Foole is Dead. Long live the King!

Barrack Hussein Obama delivered a fine acceptance speech on becoming President Elect. So said my goosebumps. Very powerful stuff.

It was the first time I had seen and heard more than a soundbite of Obama's famed oratory — two avoidance years plus eighteen listening minutes, and I then knew why he has this reputation. Compelling cadence, great words, good looks, and authoritative body language make him a gifted messenger with a welcomed message.

His message was simple: CHANGE. Delivered with pathos, and ethos, in clear English, President Elect Obama's fine words made for a heady brew after all the dissembling, and disemvoweling of the drawled-out, last, eight, years. At last a man of stature, not swagger, to represent the US to the outside world.

Yet the flip side of getting carried away with Obama is just as good... George Bush and his neocon, crony-capitalist climate-wrecking, with-us-or-against-us, terror-obsessed, bellicose, pugilistic agenda... are all gone come Jan 20. As the Dog's Bollocks kindly puts it, "Bye Bye Bushites!"

Praise the Lord and pass the whiskey! The election of Barrack Obama to President of the United States marks the end of the toxic neocon dream - we don’t react to reality – we create reality. The Bush Administration has been the most grotesque in US history. The foxes had finally taken over the hen-house. It was bound to end in tears, and so it has. To use some Bushite vernacular – it has been the mother of all clusterfucks.

I cannot recall a single redeeming feature of the Bush Administration, let alone three. The littany of policy disasters is mind boggling both in extent and all-encompassing range. Begun by stealing the 2000 election, to the cronyism of putting Monsanto in charge of the EPA and Halliburton in charge of the administration. Deficit creating tax cuts for the uber-wealthy – the golden boys and girls of the ponzi financial schemes and scams. Two ill-advised and botched invasions which have done nothing but breed support for Al Q’aida and run up trillion dollar budget deficits. Hurricane Katrina. The failure to plan for energy efficiency, preferring instead to wage war on oil rich dictatorships under the guise of spreading democracy and liberation, all the while enriching the coffers of Halliburton and Bush’s oil cronies. The cultivation of Christian Fundamentalists within the Administration and lobby industry while undermining the fundamental principles of the US constitution in the name of an apocalyptic Never-Ending War on Terror.

All finished off with the mother of all financial distasters when the ponzi schemes collapsed – products of the great freemarket experiment allowing the proliferation of unregulated financial systems that no-one really understood. The undoing of which almost resulted in a global meltdown, narrowly averted only by massive injections of liquidity from the public purse.

To be fair, GWB's focus on Africa is a bit redeeming, and Iraq might limp home to proper democracy in 20 years. But Jesus, what a way to do it. Worst of all is his war on climate science, and his fossil fuel agenda. You fuck with reality, and it will come back and bite you hard on the arse.

Nah, there's nothing much redeeming about Bush, unless you do comedy for a living.

Two unfinished wars, two bubbles, and two recessions. Bye bye Bushites. History will, like the world did, just shake it's head at how a hegemon handed over it's moral authority for the next contender to step-up. For the last eight years we've been head-shaking. Is US democracy that malign?

Now here's Obama, American dream incarnate, stepping up to reclaim that moral authority by hitting all the right notes about embracing the global challenges that befall us, including climate change.

Even his name, Barrack, Blessed; What a fabulous story so far. We have yet to see how he goes, but right now I am hooked. I have hope. It's Mandela all over again, this time it's not my old country, but the world that needs to be brought back from the precipice.

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