For the incurably simple-minded, this presidential election has ushered-in TEOTWAWKI. They insist that Obama-Biden will be the immediate ruination of our nation, labeling anyone who didn't vote for McCain-Palin stupid, un-American and worse.
My first reaction to that kind of ignorance is that I can't imagine anything so stupid and un-American as insulting the will of The People.What's lost on these folks is that the fear-and-loathing tactic played a large part in costing McCain-Palin the election -- at the very least, it didn't work. It certainly didn't earn my vote yesterday, and it won't win my support now.
Passionate devotees of President-elect Barack Obama, on the other hand, see yesterday's victory as nothing short of complete salvation, the righting of everything that's wrong with America. They're being just as irrational as their glass-empty counterparts on the right, of course. The reality of presiding over an entire nation will set in soon enough.
No, the truth lies somewhere in between. Both at its best and at its worst, Obama-Biden is a mixed bag.
This morning, the Republican Party must begin to come to grips with the fundamental reason why it lost the presidency and considerable legislative ground: It got caught up in fighting the last political war. Now the party's challenge is to gain a foothold on the new American landscape and fight like hell on that ground, not in some conservative fantasy that no longer exists.
Of greatest concern to me is the threat that the next administration -- along with a like-minded Congress and two or more Supreme Court appointments -- poses to individual citizens' rights under the Second Amendment. The fractious RKBA community doesn't have a second to waste assembling its trademark circular firing squad. Obama-Biden won, in a walk, and it is what it is. We fight where we stand.
And fight we will. Μολὼν λαβέ.
In closing, two thoughts. Speaking as a gray-haired white guy who, as a child, saw firsthand racist evil in the segregated South of the 1960s, I share the pride and joy of every American who celebrates the historic nature of what Barack Obama has accomplished.
And finally, to every American voter who made independent, informed choices -- irrespective of what those choices were -- you have my respect. Sheep, be they red or blue, do not.
We, The People, go forward from here.
