We’re almost always on the same page, so it ought to come as no surprise that once again, Bill has perfectly given voice to exactly what I’ve been thinking:

Some of us sit on our ivory impalement stakes, preening about our “rationality,” our “civilization,” our pride that we don’t suffer from “Obama Derangement Syndrome.”

Meanwhile, the liberties of the Republic – “if we can keep it” – given us by our Founders and Framers, via their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor are heading straight down the toilet while we pretend that politics is a game of beanbag played by “honorable rules.”

We are fools.

Do you value liberty? Do you value the republic the framers gave us? Do you hate socialism? Do you despise those who would destroy the American dream of self-reliance, individual liberty, and personal advancement by trading it for a nightmare mess of socialist, statist pottage?

You do? And yet you would soothe your own idiotic sense of personal value by refusing to dirty your hands with the vicious matters of victory over an opponent who has no such qualms, no such restraints?

I’ve seen several bloggers I respect and admire calling for our side to be civil, to exercise restraint, to give Obama the benefit of the doubt. They’re entitled to go that route if they wish, of course, but I have no intention of doing so myself. I don’t see one reason why his having “won” this election — using every duplicitous method available to him; some of which were actually criminal, and which now will never be properly investigated and will therefore serve to undermine our Republic even further — alters in any way what I said about him prior to Tuesday evening. He’s still the same Chicago charlatan he was all along.

I didn’t pull my punches then, and I won’t now. Obama is a corrupt, conniving, double-dealing, socialist fraud in Messiah’s clothing. The people whose hands are pulling his wires are a threat to this nation’s security, economic well-being, sovereignty, and continued existence as a free Constitutional republic. Some of them are motivated merely by personal greed or lust for power, or both. Some of them are disingenuous about their carefully-concealed motivations and agendas. Some of them are actually, truly evil.

Seems to me that to change my tune about him while he’s still performing the same old song and dance he has been all along would be self-deceptive at best and dangerously foolhardy at worst. if I thought he was an abomination before the election, what on earth could have happened since to change my mind? Does the fact that he managed to throw his magical pixie dust into the eyes of 52 percent of the voting public require that I rethink my considered opinion about him?

My own opinion was formed over the past year as I looked at the man, Barack Hussein Obama, in public giving perfectly choreographed speeches with the aid of his teleprompter and professional speechwriters, while he fumbled and stumbled and misspoke and spoke inartfully every time he was without his props.

My opinion only hardened every time I heard Obama inventing relatives out of whole cloth to add flourish to his carefully constructed, oh-so-American narrative.

Lies by any other name…still lies.

My opinion was gradually set in steel as I read and studied and pored over Obama’s own books. The incongruous details of his race-obsessed memoir — the invented episodes, the composite characters, the utter lack of humility and true introspection — all bespoke a man of innate dishonesty and a lack of healthy shame. His audacious book on politics did nothing but hammer home his lack of principles and values, as he equivocated every single position, until the reader could determine absolutely nothing coherent about the writer.

Barack Obama has lived 47 years. In all that time, he has presented himself in public as a multi-dimensional symbolic figure, self-anointed as far more special than any of his actual deeds have ever — even in a single instance — validated as reality. If ever there was a more enigmatic figure in American public life, I have yet to discover him.

The subtitle of the above article says it all: John McCain wanted to be nice; Barack Obama wanted to be president. Wherein we also find this:

…one does not need to have studied at the famed American War College to know that when a battle calls for a Patton, one does his country no favor by going as a Bradley instead.

When the object is to win, it would seem that the most salient key to victory lies in properly gauging the true character of one’s opponent. And in this regard, it seems to me that our beloved Senator McCain — outstanding war hero and statesman that he is — failed to comprehend the reality on the ground regarding Barack Obama and that army of trench fighters backing his candidacy.

As McCain went, so many of the better angels of the dextrosphere wish to go. But McCain, liberal media darling for only so long as he bucks conservatives and isn’t running against a Democrat, fucking lost — just as many of us fully expected him to. And you might wish to note that he didn’t exactly lose small, either.

From a purely practical view — the pragmatic one, if you haven’t gotten sick enough of that word from the mouths of RINO chumps and losers over the past, oh, eight years or more to gag a little every time you hear it — what exactly has all this misplaced courtesy, unearned respect, and forced good will gotten us in the past, anyway? When did “reaching across the aisle” ever get a Republican anything but a shiv in the back, delivered with not even a grateful smile or a “thanks, sucker,” but another round of the exact same kind of contumely that preceded the doomed and gullible effort?

Being able to think of myself as the “better man” while I, watch liberty stolen; the Constitution flung down and danced upon; the government’s power over us expand; entire industries brought under the yoke of federal mismanagement; the government schools turned into little more than indoctrination centers; and the nation as a whole lurch ever leftward, is worse than cold comfort. It’s no comfort at all, magnified by a creepy, queasy feeling of…well, guilt, almost, that I did nothing more about it than congratulate myself for my chivalry and gentlemanly good manners.

Like I said, we know who and what this new Pee-resident is; I see no reason to waste a moment hoping that he’s going to suddenly do something he’s never done yet in his brief and undistinguished career: tack to the center, or take a tough position in alliance with his ideological foes and defy 20 years worth of mentorship and guidance from, as Bill says:

…those who hate America, who are the most atrocious, racist bigots, who are sworn communists dedicated to the destruction of our capitalist systems, who are Islamic fascists dedicated to the destruction of not just our way of life, but our very lives. He is backed by legions of those who used every possible scurrilous, vicious, evil tactic to win, and win they did.

In warfare, strategies must change to reflect new tactical realities; warfare, in the end, is merely politics up close and personal. Nobody would dream of denying that this election has ushered in a new political reality. Either we consider the bedrock principles of this nation worth vigorously defending…or we don’t. Either we believe Obama is what all available evidence demonstrates him to be…or we don’t. Either we acknowledge that collegial bipartisanship has brought us nothing but defeat after defeat at the hands of an all-in opposition, and we resolve not to flinch from telling hard truths about them in plain language…or we don’t.

All the nice-guy gladhanding maybe wouldn’t rankle so much if a lot of the same people hadn’t said some pretty strong things about Obama — right up until he won. Did they not believe what they were saying then, or now? Seems to me it has to be one or the other.

Of course, we don’t need to descend into the unhinged, by-any-means-necessary fanaticism of our adversaries. But the battle for America’s soul won’t be won by discussing our differences over tea and crumpets. We ought to be at least as dedicated to our ideals — backed up as they are by the nation’s founding documents and principles, which no one on our side regards as “flawed,” malleable, or transitory — as they are to theirs. Those of who are needn’t be shy about saying so.