Waiting For The Miracle

Back a million years ago during the darkest days of the Age of Commander Cuckoo Bananas, we Liberals used to make a big deal of the fact that it was gonna take a generation to undo all of the destruction wrought by eight years of the Bush Administration;s pandimensionally ruinous fuckuppery.  They had pulverized everything they had touched into a poisonous snarl of barbed-wire-botulism-and-dynamite and they had left behind a cohort of dead-eyed  dead-ender fanatics fanatically dedicated -- as a matter of standard operating policy -- to making every shitty situation infinitely worse by any means necessary.

Maybe some people were under the impression that that this "It will take decades" talk as merely the rhetorical pinstriping of bloggers who had to SHOUT to be heard over the din of Republican sappers demolishing the republic.

It was not.  

This was never going to be easy.  

There never was a Big Wooden Timejump Wheel down in the basement that would turn it all around overnight if we just pushed hard enough on the king spoke.  This was never going to happen without crushing disappointments from our own leaders, relentless sabotage from the Right, and understandable exhaustion and despair and contempt from within our own ranks as every couple of tiny steps forward seemed destined to be immediately followed by some bit of dumbfuck backsliding calibrated specifically to demoralizing the base.

It was never going to be easy, but it is at least possible that we made a small step in the right direction today.  Charlie Pierce turns an unjaundiced but case-hardened eye on President Obama's speech today and comes away with some unsparingly realistic observations:

... Let us be honest with ourselves as a political people. Had Barack Obama run for president completely on the platform laid out above — not piecemeal, like closing Gitmo or restraining wiretaps — and had he run for president by divesting himself fully of the prevailing momentum from that rage and that fear that still existed in 2008, then he every likely would not have found enough people in this country to vote to make him president. We are the people who strung the tightrope on which he now walks, and on which every president after him will walk as well. That's why half the speech defended what he'd done, while the other half tried to define the limitations of what he can do.

So the speech came down to little more than an attempt to find an exit strategy for an eternal war. We did X, because all the alternatives were worse. We will try to do Y. but maintain our right to do Z, if necessary. The global war on terror always was the vehicle through which conundrums were produced that presidents would have to solve. His predecessor didn't try to solve them because he didn't see them as conundrums at all. We rewarded that view by re-electing him. Now, at the very least, we have a president who recognizes that he's in a box on this kind of thing.

We will never elect a president on a platform that he will weaken the office, and that also means giving back powers only recently acquired and exercised. If that were the case, then George W. Bush would have been a one-term president. The speech today was probably the best for which we could hope. What was even more clear is that he has no intention of letting Congress off the hook, either...

I know it must have hurt you
It must have hurt your pride
To have to stand beneath my window
With your bugle and your drum,
And me I'm up there waiting
For the miracle, for the miracle to come.