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.
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.
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.
As I walked [to my hotel on election night], 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?
Read those last four paragraphs again. I think Hitchens is right...to a point. He's dead on that America is the last best hope for the Earth, and it is precisely because of our freedoms -- upon which foundation our suspicion of 'welfare addition, feeble justice, and high taxes', as well as our Christianity are built -- that we stand alone against the secular and Islamic world. I think that this election has placed genuine socialists in charge of this country, and that there is a very real danger that those socialists may permanently erode the foundations of America to the point that they cannot be rebuilt. He's also dead on that the Republican party has failed to protect those foundations (the Democrat party has long abandoned them).
Where I would disagree is with his implication that the people of America want that to happen. It is clear that the elites in Washington, the media, and academia want that socialization very badly, this nation is still a center-right nation. Unfortunately, the far-Left has gained temporary control by looking and sounding center-right. The hope we have is that the far-Left agenda will very soon become very evident, and will be rightly rejected by this center-right nation. The question is, of course, how much Left-ization is done before that happens. The longer the far-Left remains hidden from the majority of the American people, the more damage will be done. That's why it is so critical to understand that the media has gone fully over to the Left, and why it is equally critical to support the new media and to prevent things like the Fairness Doctrine from becoming law.
I really like how Hitchens positions America's role in the world, as the sole leader in terms of freedom, individualization, and Christianity. I think that's correct. But, I've said before how America is generally on a path that follows England, and Hitchens reminds us that England is too far gone to be saved, warning that if America similarly falls, there is no one left to protect freedom. He would know - he's a Brit, and it's only a matter of time until the rampant capitulation in England literally kills the country.
This is our mission over the next two years: to inform the American public about the socialist policies of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi trifecta, and why they are so dangerous. Hitchens lays out the stakes very well, helping us understand exactly what we're fighting for.
There's my two cents.
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