Originally Posted by RetroGunslinger

I'm still moving to Canada.

Originally Posted by highthief

No idea about how effective Obama will be, but it's hard not to think he won't be an order of magnitude better than the train wreck that has been the USA for the last 8 years under the worst president you lot ever had.

Originally Posted by roachboy

it is the morning after the election.

what seems clear is that the defeat is bigger than the victory.
i watched faux news for a while last night after the results were clear. it was like visting a funeral parlor. they were holding a wake for their business model. this is reason to be cheerful.

i have no problem with folk who are conservative, but i have had a Big problem with the kind of conservatism that was front and center during the last 8 years. that conservatism has encountered its waterloo. and it was entirely of it's own making.
it'll be interesting to watch what happens with the republicans over the next year: they are in a difficult position. i hope they remake themselves, remake their language in particular.

i feel as if there is reason to think that things may be less barbaric. there is reason to think that the united states will not find itself a banana republic in 2 years. there is reason to think that perhaps a more humane form of capitalism might be created, a more rational global order. there is reason to think that maybe the benefits of these will reach more people, and produce a system that is more just, if only because there will be space in national politics to talk about things like social justice.

i do not think obama is a solution. i just think he is more open, more curious about the world, less ideologically blinkered. in a rapidly changing situation, we do not need another ideologue.

there are a host of problems that he will run straight into. the principal thing that will carry this new administration into these problems will be a kind of bump, a brief grace period in the context of which problems that otherwise would be intractable will hover in the air. i think there will be a period during which much of the world will say "hello. we've been waiting for sanity to come back to the states."

what matters is what happens after that.
but for the moment, i think this was a big big deal, this is a big deal.

i feel like the car i am in, which i am not driving, is backing away from the edge of something Very Bad.
that is my main emotion.
relief for its own sake.
a feeling that, despite everything, we didn't hit the wall.

Originally Posted by highthief

I prefer Dick Tuck's concession years ago in California:

"The people have spoken ... the bastards!"