Waking Up

What can we possibly talk about today, except for President Obama's inauguration? After an eight year nightmare, we're finally waking up.

Note that we're waking up, not entering a dream world of chocolate houses and candy cars (though on reflection both of those things would probably turn out to be rubbish and impractical anyway). Obama's a politician, and that means compromise and sneakiness and expedience. What it doesn't mean, or shouldn't, is mendacity, hubris, idiocy, rabid devotion to ideology over evidence, and pissing all over whatever laws happen to stand in your way. Those things, one can hope, are firmly in the past, at least for now.

Back to reality, then. Except, of course, that our nightmare was so bad, it's tainted the waking world as well. Bush and his Elite Gibbering Bastard Squad have become the world's own personal Freddy Krueger. Two countries lie in ruins (three if you include the massive problems the US faces with its infrastructure, plus that little matter of New Orleans), fishermen across the States are more likely to catch coal, pig shit and dysentery than they are a trout, and the world seems to have lost its wallet before it picked us up for our date.

The amount of time Obama will have to spend clearing up this sham of a mockery of a farce of a FUBAR is impossible to gauge. It's depressingly possible that by 2012 the US will still be in worse shape than it was in 2000. And of course many of the surviving Republicans in Congress, rather than getting to their knees and thanking God their constituents are still so imbecilic as to have voted them back in once more [1], are promising to mess with anything that actually gets accomplished, apparently mainly as an act of petulance.

Miles to go before we sleep, then. I'll worry about that tomorrow, though. For today, I'm happy enough to just be awake.

[1] I'm not saying voting for a Republican is stupid a priori. I'm saying voting for a Republican who in the current political climate promises to derail anything the elected government tries to get done, in an attempt to keep things the same as they were under the worst administration in American history, is so stupid it makes my teeth hurt.