The night we waved goodbye to America... our last best hope on Earth Last updated at 5:57 PM on 10th November 2008
Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful re placement 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-decepti on 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 th e Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducte d 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 r ecorded 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 r ecord, 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 be lieve anything. He plainly doesn’t believe it himself. His cliche-stuf fed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. I t was what you would expect from someone who knew he’d promised too mu ch 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 wha t he is used to. Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really di d 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 o ur own Mr Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of histor y (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 t his sort of stuff. And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his ad miring audience by repeated – but rather hesitant – invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his wi ll – ‘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 ex actly? 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 s ing in perfect harmony’ which contains roughly the same message and mi ght 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 obe dient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political mac hines in America. They know that one of his alarmingly close associate s, a state-subsidised slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convic ted on fraud and corruption charges. The rest: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1084111/PETER-HITCHENS-The-night-waved-goodbye-America--best-hope-Earth.html --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
