So, for the record, I think Obama is going to win in two weeks. Sure, it might not happen, I’m not stupid enough to be complacent, but that’s the scenario I choose to believe in and will continue, in my little way, to work for. Further, I think that when that happens, it will be momentous. We’ll all go nuts for a day or so, and I dare say, not a few someones somewhere will be humming “Happy Days are Here Again.” If that happens in some form or another, it won’t last long. Historic yes, but an Obama victory is going to be final battle in a long war. The losers in that war won’t go quietly, and the stage it all plays out on will be left barely standing by the time it’s over.

Because, for a group of folks that claim that they don’t believe in history too much, Cheney, Bush & Henchmen, Ltd., assisted and applauded by herds of other assorted lead actors and minor character players during their whole pillaging, lurching Republican TransMillenial Epochal Bender, sure have brought an end to the party that belies that claim. 

It depends on who you talk to whether you buy that

1) Chimpco really was hellbent on bringing the whole thing, the party, the administration, the government, the economy, the country, down in flames around themselves (remember, Crawfordis just down the road apiece from Waco):

Or,

2) maybe they did at last realize the jig was up, a change was indeed gonna come, and so they just resorted to the standardized scorched earth exit strategy, intent on hamstringing the coming Obama administration as much as possible. Either path of intent, or maybe a combination of both, brings us to the fine state of shambles we find the country in as they leave the stage. 

Of course, we’ll be dealing with McCain/Pailin’s contributions in the third and final act. You’ve got to wonder what will be left to hand over to President Obama by January 20, 2009. Even as that new day dawns, we’ll all still be breathing the acrid smoke left in the wake of McCain’s March to the Sea: a whipped, snarling bunch of opposition voters, the Republican Base, losers on the wrong side of history, their every resentment, every supposed inequity, every lizard-brained shred of paranoia turned up to 11, watching their defeated leaders ride off into the sunset.

With that semi-post-Republicapocalyptic scenario in mind, I imagine the the Bush/Obama transition of power bearing a figurative similarity to a long-ago incident involving Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, recounted in Nick Tosches’Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll:

Since the beginning, Jerry demand to close every show he appeared in. In 1958 Alan Freed insisted that Lewis precede Chuck Berry in a show. They still talk of that show, how Jerry Lee had the crowd screaming and rushing the stage, how he took a Coke bottle of petrol from his jacket pocket and doused his piano with one hand as the other hand banged out “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On,” how he set the piano aflame, his hands still riding the keys like a madman as the kids went finely and wholly berserk with the frenzy of it, and how Jerry Lee stalked backstage, stinking of lighter fluid and wrath, turned to Chuck Berry, and said, real calm, as the sound of the kids going crazy and stamping and yelling for more shook the walls, “Follow that, n*gger.”

So in the wake of this ugly, shameless, mendacious, and cynical failure of government, how does a winning ticket start making change? How does President Obama begin, and with what end in mind? What, if anything, gets fixed, what’s left till next year, what’s left for us to keep bearing? The economy? Iraq? Afghanistan? Can we get some things redressed, repealed, rolled back, reformed, restored, like, you know, the Bill of Rights?

At best, it’s going to be a daunting challenge of a start, and it’s not like there won’t already be a host ofnarratives being spoonfed to the public. And you’re right, this isn’t even taking into account the likelihood of major legal challenges to the legitimacy of an Obama victory in the polls. Or for that matter, the complacency of entrenched incumbents in Congress, Democratic as well as Republican, folks who have not, for the most part, impressed any of us.

None of that lets us off the hook though. We are the voters, the ones who worked for change, and we are beholden to ask:what do we got on the spacecraft that works? I think the answer is: quite a lot, actually.
 

Continue reading “Fables of the Preconstruction”

But I would laugh my ass off and pop and extra bottle of bubbly if he did. I don’t think I saw a single person turn around even as the line snaked outside the front door and into the parking lot. It’s fair to say there were well over 500 people waiting in line when I left. You could see it in their faces, they were going to wait this line out, hell or high whatever. They were there for a reason, and they would not be denied. I was thinking, yeah, these are the people who put Obama at … Continue reading Not That Obama’s Gonna Take Texas

As he very well might at this point, Barack Obama shows up and knocks on your door. After you throw a tarp over the crack van in the driveway and quick hide the Christian babies from his ravenous liberal maw, what do you say to him?

My answer beneath the cut.

Continue reading “Tuesday Game”