Melanie Phillips writes in The Spectator:

So now we are promised a change in America’s fundamental values. And they really will be changed. Obama has said in terms that he thinks the US constitution is flawed. America’s belief in itself as defending individual liberty, truth and justice on behalf of the free world will now be expiated instead as its original sin. Those who have for the past eight years worked to bring down the America that defends and protects life and liberty are today ecstatic. They have stormed the very citadel on Pennsylvania Avenue itself.  

Millions of Americans remain lion-hearted, decent, rational and sturdy. They find themselves today abandoned, horrified, deeply apprehensive for the future of their country and the free world. No longer the land of the free and the home of the brave; they must now look elsewhere.

But to where should they look?

 Diana West comments on race as a motive for voting for Obama and quotes the fine (African-American) scholar Shelby Steele:   

In a particularly trenchant post-election column, author Shelby Steele explained how it was that a candidate he describes as "quite unremarkable" regarding public policy (an amalgam of "old-fashioned Keynesianism" and "recycled Great Society") was able, first, "to project an idealized vision of post-racial America," and then "have that vision define political decency." Once these visions were set, Steele writes, "a failure to support Obama politically became a failure of decency."

In this way, the white voters who became Obama’s political base were vested in the success of Obama’s vision – or, rather, in the vision of Obama’s success. Longing to "escape the stigma of racism," as Steele calls it, white voters became "enchanted" with Obama because their support for him provided evidence and certification of their own now self-evident state of "post-racial" enlightenment.

But, as Steele further explains, there’s an inherent contradiction to this unusual, if not historically unique, relationship. "When whites – especially today’s younger generation – proudly support Obama for his post-racialism, they unwittingly embrace race as their primary motivation. They think and act racially, not post-racially. The point is that a post-racial society … seduces whites with a vision of the racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation. A real post-racialist … would not care about displaying or documenting his racial innocence. Such a person would evaluate Obama politically rather than culturally."

Bingo. Here Steele demystifies the great and perplexing divide between those who care supremely about documenting and displaying their own "racial innocence" – and I would put the mainstream media, Obama voters and most politicians including John McCain into that category – and those who don’t. These latter "real post-racialists" see Obama as a man, not an icon, as a politician who emerged from a hotbed of anti-American radicalism, not a sacred totem of enlightenment better suited to a glass case at the Smithsonian than the boisterous tussle of the political arena.

For almost two years, Obama has been, in Steele’s words, evaluated culturally. This has resulted in reverential media non-coverage and now post-election judgments and metaphors that are already beginning to defy satire. Of course, Barack Obama didn’t end the Civil War, isn’t the reincarnation of RFK, and benefits from, but didn’t bring about, the long-entrenched social changes that facilitated his political rise. As he now heads to the White House, it’s crucial that he finally be regarded as a politician, not a messiah, and as a man, not a moral judgment. Otherwise, the cultural juggernaut he seems likely to unleash will be unstoppable.

Read the whole thing here. 

 We believe neither in the Christ nor the Antichrist, but greatly like the poetry of the Jewish and Christian bibles in the English of King James’s translators.

In the Book of Revelation, St John the Divine predicts the end of the world, preceded by spectacular calamities caused by the destructive power of terrible beasts. One beast, traditionally the Antichrist, is numbered 666.

He is an economic egalitarian, who will severely curtail the free market, according to Revelation 13:16-18:  

‘And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save that he had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Here is the wisdom, Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.’ 

Well now, for believers, or for those who enjoy such oddities, here’s the news: 

The day after the election, November  5, the winning number in the Illinois state lottery (evening pick 3) was 666.

Think what you will. 

 The headmaster in my last entry, A Comedy for Comfort, would be happy with the meaning of the presidential election as discerned by Ben Shapiro in his Townhall article today:

Barack Obama was the vessel for that [unity] movement. He was an utter cipher. But he embodied the need of the American public for unity by hearkening back to the ultimate unifying feature of American life: third-grade slogans. He spouted Hope and Change. He told us, “We’re All Americans.” He told us, “Yes, We Can.”

From any other politician, it would be ridiculous drivel. From a black candidate, it was inspiring. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson didn’t talk like that – they spoke the language of division. Because Obama spoke the language of unity, he had to be a moderate. So went our logic.

Barack Obama had us from the moment he said, “Hope.” In that moment, Obama accomplished two simultaneous transformations. First, he transformed himself into a moderate. Second, he transformed himself into a messianic figure, the object of our longing: the physical embodiment of America’s progression beyond racial conflict. If America wanted to move beyond conflict, what better way than to embrace a candidate who could end all racial conflict?

And the Obama campaign subtly played on this theme. They implied that if we voted against him, we were engaging in racial hatred; some supporters even implied America would undergo a race war if he lost. That’s the last thing we wanted.

We wanted to feel good again. That is what the Great Election of 2008 was about. It was about Americans’ desire to feel a part of Something Larger. To do something together, as Americans. In today’s day and age, that Something Larger cannot be the America Ronald Reagan preached about – the left has attacked that America as racist, sexist, and selfish. That Something Larger had to be an individual who could provide us with the feeling of unity.

Barack Obama told us that we could do Something Larger simply by voting for him. When he said, “Yes We Can,” and we followed by screaming it, chanting it, shouting his name in unison, we were Doing Something Larger. We were uniting.

America has always recognized that unity for its own sake is useless at best and dangerous at worst. Unifying behind a mysterious charismatic figure promising transformational change may make us feel good, but it is a betrayal of the open and honest governmental debate our Founding Fathers sought and so many Americans have fought and died to preserve.

Americans think they grew up during Election 2008. They think they moved beyond the past. In one way they did. In another, more important way, they regressed dramatically – to a time before politics mattered. In the next four years, there will be plenty of growing up to do.

How would a community organizer, having a very large community to organize – the entire population of the United States – choose to do it? We know how. We have been told. The prospect is withering! 

David Limbaugh writes about the many lying slanders on America and the Bush administration that have been propagated ruthlessly by the Democrats, the fraudulence of the Obama campaign, and why we should be afraid.

The whole column is a must-read here. An extract:

Everything about Obama’s campaign is fraudulent. He masquerades as a uniter while dividing, polarizing and alienating us. He denies he’s liberal, when objective sources score him as the most liberal senator. He says he barely knows militants and radicals with whom he has spent his lifetime cavorting and whose worldviews – horrifyingly – he shares. He brazenly disguises welfare redistributions as tax cuts. He and his surrogates keep changing his tax plan.

With his ideas about spreading the wealth, entrepreneurial selfishness, the ongoing "original sin" in our Constitution, the inherent evil of corporations, nationalized health care, and the civil rights movement not doing enough to bring about "economic justice" – a euphemism for "Marxism" used by radicals, such as Bill Ayers, who still hate America – are you not concerned at just how far Obama might go if he’s got a nearly veto-proof Democratic majority at his back?

With his known discomfort with American exceptionalism, his naive mindset about good and evil in the world, his reckless underestimation of threats to America, his stated intention to disarm our nuclear weapons unilaterally, his open-borders extremism, his willingness to relax our intelligence monitoring, and his misguided concern for terrorists’ rights, how can America be as secure under his watch?

With his sordid background in "community organizing" and his symbiotic relationship with an organization that is engaged in a systematic effort to steal this election, his thug tactics to investigate and silence his critics, and his Democratic colleagues’ willingness to use government to shut down conservative talk radio, are you not worried about our liberties under an Obama administration?

Before our very eyes, America stands poised to elect as president the most radical man ever to run for this office credibly. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.