Tuesday, November 04, 2008

OBAMA!

An Obama victory would be the only positive legacy of George W. Bush's nightmare presidency.

Flickr set of the Obama family on election night.

These are from earlier in the year in Oregon.







From 1963. It's been a long road!

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

No offense, but what if the conspiracy theorists are correct in that the "NWO" controls both candidates, and that Bush policies will approximately continue?

IMO the United States died years ago. Don't know what to call this new entity under new management in its place.

Anonymous said...

In a large crowd, most people are of average or below average intelligence. Fanatics, even more so.

Dave Bacon said...

"In a large crowd, most people are of average or below average intelligence. "

I wouldn't tempt the law of large numbers: I'd guess the answer is average intelligence.

gcochran said...

Put not your trust in princes.

Seth said...

Steve:

You seem to attract more than your share of grumpy commenters. Obama is a remarkably gifted man, both in his ability to find the core of an issue and in his capacity to find his way to a healing articulation of his response to it.

A lot of Republicans seem unable to get past the fact that the support of a crowd invariably depends on a degree of projection and wishful thinking. What do you think sustained public support for the present administration in past years? Penetrating insight into geostrategic policy matters? Hardly. Try jingoism.

Bush took office with the feeblest of margins and behaved as if he had a Reagan-scale mandate. Obama has won decisively and will show more prudence and moderation than Bush could muster if he ever made the attempt. God speed!

Anonymous said...

...the support of a crowd invariably depends on a degree of projection and wishful thinking.

How true!

What do you think sustained public support for the present administration in past years? Penetrating insight into geostrategic policy matters?

LOL

Yes, Obama clearly has the mandate and is already showing maturity rarely seen in US politics in recent years. He has many challenges ahead, but if anyone has a chance it is him, by a wide margin.

But things could have been very different had Lehman collapse not happened until after the election. I think that woke people up and they paid less attention to "hockey-mon VP", "lipstick on a pig" and other such issues.

Poor Steve, he lost his cool (uncharacteristically) for a few weeks on the Palin choice! Hopefully, he is feeling better now :)

MFA

Anonymous said...

the election of obama is a great day for our country...not just because he is african-american, but because he is smart, even tempered, energetic, optimistic, open to the ideas of others and an excellent verbal communicator...everything our previous president was not, and for which we have suffered and will continue so for some time.

i have no way of knowing if history will judge obama to have been one of our better presidents, but i am certain he will not be judged the worst..that ignominious distinction has just been claimed by his predecessor.

Anonymous said...

hcl

are you saying you see no significant differences between the policies of carter, reagan, bush 1 clinton, and bush 2..?

NWO "controls" candidates?

i think not...interest groups, money, powerful individuals, personal preferences and a variety of other factors are at play and in complex ways.

may is suggest you are suffering from a perceptual disorder and would benefit from treatment

Anonymous said...

principal:

It's only a four-year (maybe eight-year) coffee break before the next (neocon-selected) Republican president reverts to world-domination mode.

Expect zero change in foreign policy *direction* from Bush, only a *speed moderation*. (Obama won't leave Iraq or Afghanistan - you can bank that.)

And also zero rollback of the Constitutional rights lost during 2001-2008. (You can bank that too.)

We're in Iraq to stay (exactly as we have Germany and Japan and Italy under permanent occupation), and Homeland Security isn't going away.

The Freed Slave said...

Those images evoque groupthink, herding and tragic historical times to me. The American culture is great. It does not need a dramatic structural change.

Anyway.

Anonymous said...

Steve- I simply cannot understand your anti-Bush emotions. What is there to Obama? How will he lead? What is the legacy to date? How can one not conclude that your Obama faith is not religious?

The US remains the greatest nation the world has ever seen. I am hopeful that it will continue with the Obama Presidency.

Anonymous said...

Steve- I simply cannot understand your anti-Bush emotions.

Maybe you can understand them if you consider the following facts:

1. Al Qaeda chose to hijack and crash two airliners into the World Trade Center largely because it was a symbol of global capitalism, located in New York, the American city that is arguably the center of global capitalism. Indeed, this horrific event, in addition to causing the awful deaths of about 3,000 people, severely shook the U.S. and world economies.

2. Over the next few years, with the acquiescence and often active encouragement of the Bush administration and Bush's party, executives of American (and European) companies set about doing 100 times more damage to the U.S. and world economies, and by extension its security, than was done by Al Qaeda's acts of fanatical terrorism, and they did it out of arrogance, complacency, stupidity, recklessness, and sheer mercenary greed.

3. We are now confronting the powerful resurgence of the same oppressive Islamic fundamentalist regime in Afghanistan that sheltered Al Qaeda. Why? Because the Bush administration, instead of continuing to focus its efforts from 2003 until the present on preserving and solidifying U.S. gains in that region, chose to pursue a 15-year-old crackpot vision of "promoting democracy" throughout the Islamic world advocated by a small cabal of neoconservative intellectuals, based on fabricated evidence and a deliberately orchestrated propaganda campaign designed to prepare the way for an invasion of Iraq, with possible follow-on action against Syria and Iran. This has exhausted the U.S. military, to the point where its current capacity to respond to a genuine military threat to U.S. security is very much in doubt.

And that's just for starters. So don't even suggest that anti-Bush emotions are baseless.

Anonymous said...

cw

you are dead center right on!

additionally

the bushies intentionally conflated iraq with alqaeda using skewed intel and ignoring warnings from the arms investigators on the ground

now we learn today that shell gets a monopolistic no bid natural gas deal covering most of southern iraq

i call what the neocons did by its right name...treason

Anonymous said...

See What's the Matter With Greenwich? (by Daniel Gross of Newsweek and Slate).

Anonymous said...

cw-

I'm missing your point or maybe you are missing my point.

When we went into Iraq there was a general consensus that Saddam had WMD. This came not from Bush but Clinton. Further this was the received view of most Western intelligence Agencies.

Next, the reckless spending Bush initiated are similar to Obama and the democrats commitment to spending on social issues.

Third we now hear that Obama is likely to follow Bush on Iraq.

Obama's policies sounds like Bush policies. Sounds like we have Bush III :)

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