Payback

After watching Fox News all evening yesterday --- taking in Hannity, Greta, and O'Reilly from 6 to 9pm Pacific --- I clicked over to watch Rachel Maddow's show. I rarely do this, for reasons that are obvious. She's frequently wrong, and regularly dishonest. I'm rarely surprised watching her show, which is of course all progressive red meat for today's far-left Democrat partisans. But this opening segment was a little more over the top than usual. After going through a list of President Obama's accomplishments, she declared that a second term for this administration would elevate Obama as one of "the most consequential" presidents in American history. I guess that's understandable coming from someone as far-left as Maddow. The ideological mirror is true on the right side of the spectrum. Conservatives widely consider this administration as one of the worst in history, even surpassing the Carter administration for the mantle of most inept, candy-assed regime of modern times. I'm not one of those predicting a Mitt Romney landslide. Oh, I won't be surprised at a Romney win, but it'll be a close run thing no matter how it turns out. That said, folks might get a kick out of Michael's Walsh's essay, at National Review, "Crush Them." This passage is key:

From Day One of the Obama administration, real conservatives understood the explicit threat of “fundamental change,” whose meaning can now be clearly discerned in Obama’s “revenge” remark; for the Left, “revenge” is precisely what this election is all about. For them and their voting-bloc constituents, it’s payback time: payback for slavery and segregation; payback for poverty; payback for foreign wars; payback for restrictive immigration laws. They’ve long used the goals of the civil-rights movement — which after all was directed precisely against Democrats – and the Vietnam-era “anti-war” movement — which arose in opposition to the foreign policy of the Democrats — as wedges with which to crack the larger social structure and now, so close to realizing the ultimate expression of “critical theory” — that everything about America stinks — they and their media allies are doing their best to swing one last election for Obama.

Mitt Romney is an imperfect standard bearer, but tomorrow he is the army we have. Elsewhere, I’ve predicted a Romney victory and even a retake of the Senate, despite the breathtaking tactical stupidity of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, both of whom needlessly wandered into the mine field of social issues (where the media is guaranteed 100 percent arrayed against them) and blew their own feet off. But, should Romney win, he can’t simply assume the vote was a mandate for putting America back to work, and then do his corporate-turnaround thing. If he wins, if his victory is beyond the margin of David Axelrod’s ability to cheat, Mitt needs to understand that a considerable portion of his vote was not only anti-Obama but anti-Obamaism, that it was a repudiation of everything the Marxist Left and its bien-pensant fellow travelers in the media stand for. And, most important, that going forward, it’s a call to substantially reduce their influence on the body politic.

There's more at the link, but that really is it.

Just listen to the orgasmic glee at which Maddow rattles off this veritable Christmas list of pent-up progressive policy demands. She's loving the payback, and she's literally chomping at the bit for a second term to consolidate the left's programs of the last four years, knowing deep inside that these are not popular agenda items with the bulk of the American people. Obama's been lucky. From his rise as the un-vetted savior in 2008 to his exploitation of the horrible but politically fortuitous hurricane last week, this president has just been riding along atop the froth of history, with hardly a real accomplishment to his name other than becoming a vessel for all the dreams of the American neo-socialist left.

So yes, victory is important. But if Romney doesn't win tomorrow it's only going to delay the reckoning. Politics moves in cycles. Perhaps Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s cyclical theory of public purpose is now having its moment after years of private interest politics. But at some point the cycle of history swings back, and in this case it'll swing back with a vengeance. The tea party set the contemporary standard for protests movements, and activists are seasoned now at grassroots-to-governing politics. There'll be a rekindled revolt upon a second Obama term, because the left's push for change has indeed been radical and disruptive. And the left's politics has been completely divisive and contemptuous of what in the past has been largely bipartisan courtesy and respect. Obama himself governed as a calculating partisan, not the highly touted "post-partisan" unifying figure he campaigned as. He's a fraud all around, and a dishonest hack with no decency or larger values. For example, see this shocking post at Lonely Conservative as a case in point, "Uber Creepy Campaign Tweet From Team Obama."

By hook or by crook the Obama Democrat-socialists may indeed leverage themselves back into power. But if they do, there'll be a rekindled conservative movement to light a million prairie fires of outrage against a second Obama term.

Stay tuned. Either way, I'm amped up for the fight.