Rick Hitchens from the UK's Daily Mail

http://tinyurl.com/633js8

The night we waved goodbye to America... our last best hope on Earth

Last updated at 9:52 PM on 08th November 2008

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful
replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell - or that at
the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the
United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and
swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least
Mandela-worship - its nearest equivalent - is focused on a man who actually
did something.

I really don't see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the
Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in
flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess
Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.

It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which recorded
Obama's victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture
books and Obama calendars and if there isn't yet a children's picture
version of his story, there soon will be.

Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record,
his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his
blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find.

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing
machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe
anything. He plainly doesn't believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC
clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves.  It was what
you would expect from someone who knew he'd promised too much and that from
now on the easy bit was over.

He needn't worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of
America's Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton's
stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich
spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is
used to.

Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did talk
about a 'new dawn', and a 'timeless creed' (which was 'yes, we can'). He
proclaimed that 'change has come'. He revealed that, despite having edited
the Harvard Law Review, he doesn't know what 'enormity' means. He reached
depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr Blair,
burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark
of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day
(Don't try this at home).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed
as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of
stuff.

And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring
audience by repeated - but rather hesitant - invocations of the brainless
slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will - 'Yes, we
can'. They were supposed to thunder 'Yes, we can!' back at him, but they
just wouldn't join in.  No wonder. Yes we can what exactly? Go home and
keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He'd have been better off
bursting into 'I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony'
which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some
valuable commercial sponsorship.

Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per
cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient
servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in
America. They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a
state-subsidised slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on
fraud and corruption charges.

They also know the US is just as segregated as it was before Martin Luther
King - in schools, streets, neighbourhoods, holidays, even in its
TV-watching habits and its choice of fast-food joint. The difference is
that it is now done by unspoken agreement rather than by law.

If Mr Obama's election had threatened any of that, his feel-good white
supporters would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain, or
practically anyone. But it doesn't. Mr Obama, thanks mainly to the
now-departed grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and denounced as
a racial bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive private education.
He did not have to grow up in the badlands of useless schools, shattered
families and gangs which are the lot of so many young black men of his
generation.

If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then every
positive discrimination programme aimed at helping black people into jobs
they otherwise wouldn't get should be abandoned forthwith. Nothing of the
kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably be more of them.

And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist
nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn't vote
for him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is obviously
untrue.
barack obama

Yes we can what?: Barack Obama ran on the ticket of change

I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America's beautiful
capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in
the world, with 15th Street - which runs due north from the White House -
the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of
America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much
more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and
liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the
edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a
smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and
Afghanistan.

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington's secret frontiers. There had
been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result
became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World
nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.


They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that
America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the
Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part
a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against
many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally
committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian
in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global
Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly
controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They
had also been weakened by the failure of America's conservative party - the
Republicans - to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting
Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order
soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US,
like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third
World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

-- 
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is
to fill the world with fools." --Herbert Spencer

"The republican is the only form of government which is not
eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind."
-- Thomas Jefferson

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