Politics: More Thoughts and Linkblogging

You know, I'm a little worried... I thought my political obsession would end when Obama won. But it hasn't. I'm still much more casually interested in comics, TV, movies and videogames than I was about a year ago. Everything I've written about, what my career has become (in the case of comics), has taken a bit of a backseat to politics. This is worrisome, because unlike my place in the small pond of comics, I'm not really in a place to get there with politics. I'm way too old to work my way up to political pundit, and way too atheist to actually get into politics. ;)

I've been spending much of the night catching up on the very early post-mortem reactions from all the blogs I follow, and here are some of the pieces that moved me, in one way or another:

Margaret and Helen:
"I feel good, but I will feel even better when Barbara Walters slaps the crap out of Elisabeth Hasselbeck."

Fivethirtyeight.com: Chicago The Day After:
"We suspect we're not alone. Right now, organizers, full-time volunteers, campaign staff, and everyone else who gave single-minded effort toward November 4 are waking up and saying to themselves and each other, "what do I do with myself?" Their cars are messes, their rooms disaster zones, and they've been cut off from friends and family for God knows how long."

23/6: President Bush's Legacy: President Obama:
"Speaking of Bush, it is clear now, if it wasn't before, what his legacy is going to be: Obama.

Bush will be known for ushering in the Obama era, the way Herbert Hoover was known for ushering in FDR or Pete Best was known for preceding Ringo."

Paul Krugman: The Monster Years:
"What I mean by that is that for the past 14 years America’s political life has been largely dominated by, well, monsters. Monsters like Tom DeLay, who suggested that the shootings at Columbine happened because schools teach students the theory of evolution. Monsters like Karl Rove, who declared that liberals wanted to offer “therapy and understanding” to terrorists. Monsters like Dick Cheney, who saw 9/11 as an opportunity to start torturing people."

Christopher Frizelle at Slog: Majority Rules:
"One got the startling sense last night that we were bigger in number than we realized. It is possible to deeply internalize your family’s fucked up Republican arrogance, to believe on some level that you are outnumbered—as another of my relatives, also a diehard Republican, likes to chirp whenever we talk about politics, “Majority ruuu-ules!”—and one great gift of last night was the realization not only that there are lots of liberals out there (duh) but also that there are enough people out there who like liberals to make this happen (easy to forget). Obama has made liberalism likable again."

Savage Love Letter: Gay Days in Utah:
"I think there are many gay and lesbian citizens who, like me, are enraged by the campaign in support of prop 8. As you know a large chunk of the funding came from the Mormon Church. Instead of just bottling our rage, let’s all get on planes and trains, and in automobiles, and go to Utah. The plan would be for gay and lesbians to visit Utah en masse to make the point that if religious folk are going to encroach on our lives, we will encroach on theirs."

Dan Savage: Black Homophobia:
"I’m not sure what to do with this. I’m thrilled that we’ve just elected our first African-American president. I wept last night. I wept reading the papers this morning. But I can’t help but feeling hurt that the love and support aren’t mutual."

Paul Constant at Slog:
"When Obama gave his speech last night, he looked relieved, yes, and assured, yes, but he also looked tired. And it was the kind of tired you see on the face of someone who’s run five miles and has to go fifteen miles more before he or she sleeps. Intellectually, he realizes the burden of a presidency, and he’s getting ready for it. It’s amazing to watch. Here’s a man who’s giving up the rest of his life for this national service, and, completely understanding what it means, he’s doing it willingly. That’s a kind of heroism."

Talking Points Memo watches The Republican Party begin to eat itself:
"Randy Scheunemann, a senior foreign policy adviser to John McCain, was fired from the Arizona senator's campaign last week for what one aide called "trashing" the campaign staff, three senior McCain advisers tell CNN.

One of the aides tells CNN that campaign manager Rick Davis fired Scheunemann after determining that he had been in direct contact with journalists spreading "disinformation" about campaign aides, including Nicolle Wallace and other officials.

"He was positioning himself with Palin at the expense of John McCain's campaign message," said one of the aides."

Greg Sargent: Obama's Win A Death Knell for 1960s Cultural Politics?
"There's a tidy symmetry in the fact that Obama defeated, in succession, both the Clinton machine and the Rove-Atwater brand of politics that Republicans have honed for so long.

In so doing, Obama defeated not one, but both of the leading practitioners of that 1960s-rooted cultural politics. More to the point, he did this by quite literally running against politics as both those groups practiced it."

Jeff Parker: Congratulations Obama:
"What a night. I’m so ridiculously, unabashedly proud of America right now I can’t tell you. Maybe our motto should be, as would also apply to our stalled entry into World War 2, “We’ll screw up and drop the ball most of the time, but right at the very last minute of the eleventh hour when it’s almost too late- we’ll do the right thing!”"