I Am In Tears Again

This is probably over the fair use 500 word limit, but TPM doesn't always create a separate link for its front page items.

rom TPM Reader AR ...

So this is why Al Gore had to lose. Had he won, we might have been witnessing the inaugural of President Joe Lieberman. Or, worse still, President Jeb Bush. True, we may have avoided 9/11 because a President Gore would have read and acted upon the Presidential Daily Brief that warned of an impending attack by Osama bin Laden, and because he would have heeded Richard Clarke's dire, "hair on fire" warnings about Al Qaeda. True, we would not have gone to war against Iraq had 9/11 occurred, a conflict that has benefited Iran (and thus Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood) more than any other nation. Instead, we would have gone into Afghanistan with Pakistan's help - notice Pakistan's new found lament that it is a "victim of terrorism" - and rounded up Osama bin Laden and his henchmen, ending the scourge that is Al Qaeda. True, Hurricane Katrina would have been handled with competence, the capital markets would not have collapsed as a consequence of deregulation run amok, and global warming would have been arrested if not reversed. But, we would not be inaugurating President Barack Hussein Obama's first term. And this is why John Kerry had to lose. Had he won, we might have been witnessing the second inaugural of a Kerry administration, or perhaps the first inaugural of a McCain/Lieberman administration. True, the Iraq war would likely be over and a few thousand American soldiers and private security contractors would consequently be alive and in good health. And, the markets and health care and roads and bridges and our other national ailments would be just that - ailments, rather than the debilitating trauma that they are today. But, we would not have had eight years of experimenting with the extreme ideology that the Bush administration has inflicted on the United States of America. And, it is this experiment that has provided cold hard empirical evidence that the blind obeisance to free unregulated markets that is the hallmark of contemporary conservatism, coupled with the unilateral, muscular, "shoot first and ask questions afterwards" foreign policy that is at the core of neoconservatism, is as bankrupt a governing paradigm as the centrally planned economy of socialism. Had it not been for the second Bush term, we would not be inaugurating President Barack Hussein Obama's first term.
From the depths of our despair that can be graphed as a downward sloping straight line starting with the Florida electoral recount, and running through 9/11, Enron, the anthrax case of domestic terrorism, Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, the politically motivated firings of U. S. attorneys, the creation of "free speech zones", Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of Wall Street, and the replacement of the Clinton budget surplus with record deficits, all occurrences on George W. Bush's watch, there now emerges an historically singular opportunity. A brown man whose middle name is Hussein is taking an oath to preserve, protect and defend the constitution, something that would have been inconceivable had George W. Bush not been the 43rd President and something that takes on more than symbolic significance in light of the defilement the Constitution has suffered under the administration of the 43rd President.
In India, the country of my birth, we would call this sequence of events "Karma". In the United States of America, the country of my adoption, we should call this sequence of events "opportunity". An opportunity to restore America's brand abroad, by serving as a beacon of hope rather than as an object of fear. An opportunity to remind the world that American exceptionalism is derived from our charter documents -- the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights - not from our ability to instill fear. An opportunity to restore the rule of law at home, by eschewing torture as state policy, and restoring order to markets run amok. An opportunity to credibly put to rest a legitimately paranoid world's fear about America's imperialistic ambitions. An opportunity to again be the greatest nation the earth has ever seen. In Riyadh and in Rawalpindi, in Kabul and in Kyoto, in Madrid and in Mumbai, in the slums of Dharawi and in the streets of Dacca, the world will watch the improbable inauguration of President Barack Hussein Obama and know that, once again in America, anything is possible.

--Josh Marshall