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Another public service announcement from the Hard Starboard Radio Network....

~  ~  ~

D-Day has begun.

With your help and the help of almost 50,000 other Americans, we at the National Republican Trust PAC — also known as GOPtrust.com — have begun our TV assault in Georgia against Barack Obama and the left-wing Democrats who want total control over Congress.

Our new TV ad has begun to run across Georgia exposing Obama's plans.

As you know, Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss is fighting to keep his Georgia seat in GOP hands.

It is critical he does so. Chambliss will be the key Senate vote in stopping Obama's radical agenda.

But Senator Chambliss faces an incredibly stiff challenge from his opponent Jim Martin.

Just last week Obama, Chuck Schumer and Washington Democrats poured almost $1 million into the state to defeat him.

They are bussing in thousands of "organizers" to snatch this election from the GOP.

This is why our campaign is so vitally important.

Fox News analyst Dick Morris says this election is vitally important to all of us across the country.

Morris says if Obama wins the Georgia seat, he will ram through Congress a radical agenda on taxes, guns, abortion — he can even shut down talk radio!

Dick Morris says we at the National Republican Trust PAC "are leading the fight to save Chambliss and keep Obama from getting a filibuster-proof Senate."

Dick says this won't be easy for Chambliss because the Obama camp has more money and they are experts at voter turn-out — the key to winning this race.

But Dick says we can still defeat Martin and Obama.

We need your help today to do it!

Please donate to our cause by Going Here Now

See our new TV ad exposing Obama and Martin:

Thank you.

Scott Wheeler
Executive Director

P.S. We now have just two weeks before the December 2nd run-off election. We can leave nothing to chance. We need to raise millions to stop Obama. Please help us today by calling our Donor Hotline at 1-866-957-1467 or Go Here Now

This is an order to things and processes, including politics.  Keep that in mind as you watch former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal downplay Bob Schiefer's giddy touting of the obvious ascension of 2012 GOP presidential front-runner Sarah Palin:

Watch CBS Videos Online

Why didn't Mr. Newt or Governor Jindal take Schiefer's bait?  Because it's not yet time.  They're right in that the Republican Party has to rebuild by returning to its Reagan conservative roots, just as it did after the 1964 Goldwater disaster, the 1974 and 1976 post-Watergate disasters, and the 1992 Bush41 defeat.  That task will be made easier by the left-wing extremist overreaching of Red Barry and the Donk SuperCongress, just as it was on those three previous occasions.  And it will be led by the GOP governors Speaker Gingrich referred to, which includes Sarah Palin.

Recall as well that the next milepost on the road to the White House for Barracuda is winning a second term as governor of Alaska.  The most effective way of accomplishing that is for her to keep doing what got her elected in the first place and gave her the 80+% approval rating that raised her to national prominence this year.  Those tasks would be made much more complicated by speculation about her 2012 ambitions that she didn't (for now) nip in the bud.  The last thing she needs is to wear out her welcome by ceasing to be her down-to-Earth self and looking like precisely the sort of self-aggrandizing pol from which she is such a refreshing (drumroll) change.  It's not all about her (yet) and she knows that.  We're into the 2010 cycle, and that's entirely congressionally focused.  After a successful bounce-back midterm campaign, focus will turn to the 2012 GOP primaries, and after just two years of Red Barry, the "mom in hunting boots" will look like the REAL "savior of America," and help really will be on the way once again.

You'll note that, though Palin was the star of the recent Republican Governor's Association meetings, she's got her focus where it belongs.  Oh, sure, she was never really going to swerve off course into a Senate bid, so her comment about running for Ted Stevens' seat if he won a re-election that was always a pipedream after his criminal conviction this past summer was a throw-away.  But it illustrates that she knows where she is in the process, and that there's a long way to go.

But she knows, and Newt knows, and Jindal knows, and Bob Schiefer knows, and you know, and I know, that when the time comes, she will rise like Reagan did, and smite Red Barry like Reagan did Mr. Peanut, and give America a new birth of freedom.

Call it hope and change - back.

Byron York has an entry over in The Corner on NRO regarding a discussion he had with my Congressman, Mike Pence:

After his talk, Pence and I discussed how the Republican Party got into its current mess. If there’s a back-to-basics versus transform-the-party argument going on inside the Republican world, Pence is in the first camp.

“There’s nothing wrong with Republican ideas, and there’s nothing wrong with [a] governing majority that supports a strong defense, limited government, and traditional values,” Pence told me.

“The issue here is not a problem of Republican ideas or outreach. It’s been a problem of credibility. I really do believe that where the American people have seen men and women in public office who have authentically and credibly put into practice what they profess to believe about limited government and fiscal responsibility and traditional values, the American people are drawn to those leaders.”

So who is responsible for the credibility problem? Plenty of Republicans. But as Pence talked, and as he denounced the party’s “failed experiment in big-government Republicanism,” it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that in his eyes the biggest offender of all is George W. Bush.

“I hit Washington in 2001, and the first bill they put on the table was No Child Left Behind,” Pence said. “My second term in Congress, the very first bill the president put on the desk was the prescription drug entitlement.” In between, Bush never saw fit to veto even a single spending bill.

“From the very first day that he took office, he put into practice a form of big-government Republicanism that I think was anathema to most Republican voters around the country,” Pence continued. “And  ... Congress went along.”

As much as I love and admire President Bush, it is hard to disagree with any of that. The spending, I think, is what turned a lot of the Republican base off and kept them home in 2006 and 2008. We are supposed to be the party of fiscal responsibility, and when a leftist like Barack Obama can get to our right on things like tax cuts, something is terribly wrong. I just hope we can fix it before the Left takes the country down the tubes and into socialism.

JASmius adds: I've got to differ with Pence on his underlying implication that America is still a center-right country.  It is inconceivable that if that were so, the nation's voters would have installed a crypto-Marxist regime in D.C.  A responsible, ideologically right-of-center electorate would have elected the right-most government that it could, and that would have meant keeping the GOP in power, Rockefelleroid warts and all.  That it did not reinforces my long-held contention that we are a non-ideological country whose political system yields regular binary choices, and that presidential elections in the television age are quadrennial beauty contests, not battles of ideas.

If, on the other hand, one subscribes to the "GOP base is bound and determined to 'punish' its officeholders for ideological impurity" angle, I'm baffled as to how staying home and letting THESE Democrats lay waste to the nation's security, economy, civic institutions, and traditional culture unchallenged and unfettered punishes JUST Republican officeholders.  It's akin to decapitation as an expression of facial spite.  It's why even I, as much as I detest John Sith McCain, made myself connect the arrow for him and Red Barry's successor anyway.  Perhaps sometimes you can win by losing, but this result portended losses of such magnitude that the victory they ultimately produce may be pyrrhic at best.

As for Dubya's flaccid frugality, Pence is absolutely right.  But then we knew we were getting that when we went with him back in 1999-2000.  GDub isn't a Reaganian, never was, and never claimed to be.  What he was was a candidate who could win, and after eight years of Sick Willie Republicans at the turn of the century wanted to win.  A mentality that the grassroots have quite evidently lost, and which the next four years will brutally revive.

At least, one would like to think so.  There were plenty of 'Pubbies who were more than happy to let Al Gore steal the 2000 election, as I recall.  They'll be the ones me-tooing the Obamedia's Palinphobia revival in January of 2011.

Mr. Newt for RNC chair?  The feelings will doubtless be mixed:

Newt Gingrich says he's ready, willing and able to serve as chairman of the Republican National Committee.

“If a majority of the RNC thought he was needed, he would accept that appointment,” Randy Evans, Gingrich’s close friend, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He fully appreciates the urgency of the moment. The RNC has to do some soul-searching and decide what level of change is necessary. If that answer is bold, energetic change led by someone who has done it before, then Newt would be a good choice.”

But Evans warned the Journal-Constitution that if the GOP is eying a shift toward the middle, “that isn’t Newt.”

"If a majority of the RNC thought he was needed..."?  Doesn't exactly sound like he's lobbying for the job, does it?  In fact, it almost sounds like he's expecting them to come to him so he can say something along the lines of, "See, I told you so."  But leave us not forget that while Mr. Newt is a tremendous party ideologist, as a "public face" of the party his tenure as House Speaker was, shall we say, "controversial" - and I don't mean the flap over his book deal.

As for the GOP "eying a shift toward the middle," they're ALREADY in the middle, which is a lot of why they've gotten decimated the last two cycles.  They need to be eying a shift back to the Right, from whence they strayed.  There's no better time to do that than when Red Barry and the neoBolsheviks are bulldozing the country off the left cliff.

And what better "public face" to lead the GOP comeback than that of the man who would have been president-elect today if GOP nominators hadn't been suffering from rectal-cranial impaction:

Fred Thompson seems to be seriously considering a run for the leadership of the national Republican Party, as the GOP prepares to rebuild from the rubble of the 2008 election.

Supporters of Thompson, a onetime presidential candidate and former Tennessee senator, are hopeful that he might run for chairman of the Republican National Committee, a position that would make the former actor public face of the GOP.

“I’m extremely excited that he’s considering it,” said Scooter Clippard, a Middle Tennessee businessman who spearheaded national fundraising for the Thompson and McCain campaigns. “It’s time for a change. Fred Thompson would be the absolute best person to articulate that message for the party.”

Ready Freddie to lead Pachydermia out of the political wilderness, and Sarah Barracuda to take us across the metaphorical Jordan and back to the Promised Land.  Not to put too fine a "no-brainer" point on it, but what the bleep are we waiting for?

UPDATE: The Man of Steele wouldn't be a bad choice, either - but would have been a better one had the Dems gotten elected anybody of lesser pigmentation.  I don't know that we want a titular party head who can be lampooned as "the GOP's Negro".

Another public service announcement from the Hard Starboard Radio Network....

The NEW Reagan Revolution
Bring Conservatism BACK!

From the Desk of Michael Reagan

Saturday, November 8

Dear Conservative Friend,

It's official: America has its first truly Socialist president... and it's the Republican Party's fault.

No, scratch that -- it's the so-called "leaders" of the GOP who are at fault for this humiliating defeat -- and I say it's time to name names and make heads roll in our party. Because, my fellow conservatives, we have been BETRAYED by the very people who promised that, if we would just elect them, they would get into office and vote OUR conservative values.

THEY LIED... THE GOP DIED.

But we CAN resurrect it -- IF we start TODAY to take action, by both booting out our failed fake-conservative "leadership" AND vowing to FIGHT tooth and nail against the coming tidal wave of destructive, anti-American legislation that's now heading our way... thanks to Obama, Pelosi and Reid.

We CAN fight back -- Join me now in the NEW Reagan Revolution, to bring Conservatism BACK!

ReaganAction.com
https://secure.conservativedonations.com/reagan_action/?a=1781

As I sit here looking at yesterday's election results -- maps, vote tallies, exit polls, state and national results, and much more -- I have to say that, like many of you, I'm in a state of shock.

Not because I'm surprised, mind you -- I warned you that this would happen if the Republican Party nominated John McCain for president.

Yes, I was right... but believe me, that doesn't make me happy. What it makes me... is angry.

• Angry at the Democrats, of course. Once again, they ran a campaign full of lies and hate-filled attacks, from Obama's claims that he had "never heard" his racist pastor's anti-American rhetoric over a 20-year period of time, to his claims that his terrorist friend Bill Ayers was "just a guy in the neighborhood," to outright slanderous speech against Governor Sarah Palin... but hey, I expect the Democrats to act that way. It's their nature.
• Angry at the "moderate" (meaning liberal) Rockefeller-wing of the Republican Party, who tried to kill the idea of grassroots involvement of hardworking, patriotic, conservative Americans in our party. There's NO grassroots activism when the Rockefeller wing's philosophy prevails; that wing of the party consists of "kingmakers" operating from behind the throne, while the Reagan wing of the party has always lived and thrived at the grassroots, where the real Americans live. When the Rockefeller-wing philosophy prevails, the GOP loses. When the Reagan wing is in control, we win.

Angry with President Bush because he was unwilling to stop Republican Congressional leaders from overspending and because his administration failed to lay the blame for the financial crisis at the feet of Rep. Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd that protected Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from reform.

• Angry at the so-called "leaders" of our party, who promised us that if we'd just vote for who they put up for election, we'd finally get what we wanted: smaller government, lower taxes, dramatically lower spending, pro-life laws, pro-marriage constitutional amendments, pro-American economics... well, YOU AND I put them in power, and they gave us nothing but BIG GOVERNMENT, BIG DEFICITS, and LIBERAL COMPROMISES.

I say, NO MORE! Join me now in the NEW Reagan Revolution, to bring Conservatism BACK!

ReaganAction.com
https://secure.conservativedonations.com/reagan_action/?a=1781

As bad as yesterday's election results were, I believe there IS "light at the end of the tunnel" -- I believe we now have the opportunity to finally turn out these fake "leaders" that have betrayed conservatism and given us Barack Obama. We have the opportunity to bring back the Reagan wing of the Republican Party, to slow down the socialist legislation from Pelosi and Reid, and to restore this great Republic to its original ideals of basic self-evident truths: our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

This is our chance, friend. It may be our ONLY chance to save our Party -- and it may be our LAST chance to save our country.

Here's what I'm doing to help make that happen: Today, I'm officially launching a new website, ReaganAction.com. This is no wimpy little website with some news articles and a bunch of editorial writers griping about how bad things are. The time for "just talking" is OVER -- now is the time for ACTION!

Every day, we'll give the members of this site -- our own "Reagan Activists" -- the information they need in order to take real grassroots action to counter the greatest political threat we've ever faced within our own government. It won't take a lot of time -- usually only a few minutes a day -- but the political payout will be HUGE!

Here are some of the things that YOU AND I will be able to do at ReaganAction.com:

• STOP LIBERAL BILLS -- We can expect an immediate onslaught of extreme liberal bills to be "fast-tracked" through Congress and signed by Obama. We will constantly be on the watch for these bills -- and every time they get introduced, we'll alert our Activists to literally FLOOD Capitol Hill with millions of phone calls, faxes, emails and even hand-delivered letters and petitions, DEMANDING that our elected legislators do what WE say, or else face our wrath at the next election!
• FIGHT LIBERAL EXECUTIVE ORDERS -- You can be sure that President Obama (oh, how that phrase terrifies me!) will get right to work on Day One, issuing Executive Orders that will make your skin crawl: repealing pro-life presidential directives, ordering agencies to fund far-left groups like ACORN and the ACLU, signing over American sovereignty to the United Nations and the European Union... he's got a long list! But for every liberal (and usually unconstitutional) Executive Order that Barack Obama issues, we'll alert our Activists to BARRAGE the White House with even MORE phone calls, faxes, emails and even hand-delivered letters and petitions, DEMANDING that he "reverse course" on those Orders or face a Republican Congress in 2010!
• EXPOSE LIBERAL CORRUPTION -- With the Democrats back in power in both Congress and the White House, you KNOW that they'll be falling right back into their habits of taking lobbyists' money under the table, trading votes for campaign contributions, spying on and sabotaging Republican legislative plans, covering up their leaders' sexual "flings," and spending taxpayer money on personal expenses like never before. But this time, YOU AND I will be there every step of the way, making sure that no stone is left unturned, every dark corner is filled with light, and every illegal act is paid for with censure, impeachment, recalls, investigations, and jail time for every criminal we expose in Washington, D.C.
• COUNTER THE LIBERAL MEDIA -- Whenever any of these things take place, we'll be directing our "Reagan Activists" to constantly fill the news media with letters to the editor, guest editorials, and news articles detailing the socialistic and corrupt policies of the new liberal regime, and offering America a better way -- the way of freedom... the CONSERVATIVE way.

Together, we CAN save America from the new liberal regime! Join me now in the NEW Reagan Revolution, to bring Conservatism BACK!

ReaganAction.com
https://secure.conservativedonations.com/reagan_action/?a=1781

And don't forget -- I'll also be spreading the word the same way I do already: by writing nationally-syndicated columns each week, and by speaking to over five million listeners each and every weekday on my nationwide radio show!

We MUST do this. Really -- what choice do we have, except to fight back and WIN? As my father, President Ronald Reagan, once said, "We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow."

My father wasn't afraid to call evil what it was -- and neither am I. He defeated the "Evil Empire" called the Soviet Union -- but now we face a new "Evil Empire." It's called Socialism, and it's taken over our once-free nation through the victories of Obama, Pelosi and Reid.

We do NOT have to give up. We do NOT have to slink into some dark corner and lick our wounds. This is OUR MOMENT TO SHINE -- and that's why I'm launching ReaganAction.com!

Like I said before, when the Reagan wing is in control, we win. We don't need kingmakers; we need workers, and until we get them we'll stay the minority party. We don't need to keep the toady liberals who call themselves the "leaders" of the Republican Party; we need conservatives to TAKE BACK the Republican Party, and GET RID OF those losers!

WILL YOU JOIN ME, and hundreds of thousands of your fellow conservative activists nationwide? Let's show these liberals what real REAGAN Republicans can do, when WE'RE in charge of the GOP!

Join me now in the NEW Reagan Revolution, to bring Conservatism BACK!

http://www.ReaganAction.com/

With Hope in the Future,

Michael Reagan
Chairman
ReaganAction.com

P.S.  Already, the new radical regime in Washington, D.C. is planning their first legislative attacks on America:

• Huge increases in payroll and income taxes;
• Redistributions "share the wealth" policies;
• Repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act;
• Forcing faith-based groups to hire gays;
• Repeal all state regulations on abortion through FOCA;
• Require taxpayer funding of abortion through Medicaid;
• Block all efforts to "Drill Here, Drill Now" in America;
• Impose universal health care through job-killing employer mandates;
• Appoint activists liberal Supreme Court judges;
• Kill conservative talk radio by re-instituting the "Fairness Doctrine";
• Require comprehensive sex education from the earliest grades in public schools;
• Enforce bilingual education in the public schools;
• Allow convicted felons to vote;
• Take secret ballot voting away from workers deciding on whether to unionize...

The list goes on and on and on...

And it's up to YOU AND I to stop them! Don't let the door slam shut on this opportunity to make a difference...

Join me now in the NEW Reagan Revolution, to bring Conservatism BACK!

ReaganAction.com
https://secure.conservativedonations.com/reagan_action/?a=1781

Thank you!

Yes, this is a return-salvo in the obligatory (and brief) GOP post-election "civil war".  And yes, usually any retreading of an old gimmick by sticking the word "NEW!" in front of it is usually lame and flops humiliatingly.  When Ronald Reagan was rising to his date with destiny in the '70s, I don't recall anybody still extolling the virtues of President Eisenhower.  Young-gun right-wing governors like Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal are the future of the GOP, not a brand name of which nobody under the age of forty has so much as a conscious memory.

But if Red Barry and his neoBolshevik zealots pursue their hard-left agenda with all the rabidity that we have no reason to suppose they won't, there will be a Congress ripe for the re-taking in 2010 and an Executive Mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that will be in desperate need of a fresh coat of white paint by 2012.  A GOP reinvigorated by a conservative "next generation" of fresh leadership untainted by the past two cycles of failure will be poised to exploit those opportunities and not just serve as more caretakers for the malignantly expanded welfare state, but start rolling back the whole stinking mess to pre-Obama, pre-Great Society, and maybe even pre-New Deal.

The long, hard road back to the "promised land" has to start with a single step somewhere.  Why not here?  Heck, President Eisenhower wasn't such a bad fellow.

The exit polls make a dime-store prophet of Your's Truly (via Newsmax Insider):

Democrat Barack Obama garnered a surprising 20% of the vote from conservatives who cast ballots on Election Day, top-ranked radio-talker Rush Limbaugh told listeners.

Citing exit polls, Limbaugh also said on Wednesday that Republican John McCain lost independents and moderates by a margin of 60%-39%.

“McCain only got 89% of the Republican vote,” Limbaugh said. “He only got 80% of the conservative vote.

“And therein lies the tale, the recipe offered up by the wizards of smart in the Republican Party and on our side — for whatever reason we have to abandon our base, and we’ve gotta broaden our base . . . 

“I have nothing against going out and getting Democrats and independents to vote for you. But not by behaving like a Democrat or independent.”

Fox News commissioned extensive exit polling on Election Day. Some highlights:

• 75% of voters said the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction, and these voters went solidly for Obama — 62% to McCain’s 36%.
• 63% of voters said the economy was the most important issue facing the nation, and they backed Obama, 53%-44%.
• 48% said they are “very worried” that the economic crisis will hurt their family’s finances in the coming year, and they voted for Obama, 60%-38%.
• Voters who said they wanted a president who can bring about change overwhelmingly went for Obama, 89%-9%.
• Despite predictions that the 2008 election would bring a sharp increase in the number of young voters, people under age thirty comprised just 18% of all voters, up from 17% in the past three presidential elections and down from 21% in 1992. These voters went for Obama, 66%-32%.
• Among the 11% of voters who were casting ballots in a presidential election for the first time, 68% voted for Obama and 31% chose McCain.
• 18% of voters who supported President Bush in 2004 defected from the GOP and supported Obama this year.
• Women chose Obama over the McCain-Palin ticket by a margin of 56%-43%.
• 52% of white Catholics voted for McCain, compared to 47% for Obama.
• Black voters comprised 13% of the electorate and 95% of them backed Obama. White voters favored McCain by a 12-point margin.
• Hispanics helped Obama win the battleground state of Florida, voting for the Democrat over the Republican, 57%-42%. In 2004, President Bush garnered 56% of the Hispanic vote.
• In Pennsylvania, 20% of Democrats who voted for Hillary Clinton over Obama in the primary voted for McCain on Tuesday.

A few off-the-cuff conclusions that can be drawn from the aforequoted:

***No Republican has any excuse for EVER backing another shamnesty bill EVER again.

***I'm dubious of there being THAT many "conservative" "Obamicans".  Why would they not simply have abstained instead?  Though I do have to admit that my normally right-wing boss voted for Red Barry, ostensibly because he didn't like Sarah Palin.  Which, in my mind, raises the question of just how right-wing he really is.

***The American public does...not...elect RINOs, and particularly RINO senators.  They rejected Bob Dole in 1996, they rejected John Sith McCain, who was Bob Dole redux, in 2008.  Learn the f'ing lesson, GOP.

***I said nine months ago that there was no way in the ever lovin' world that Maverick could win in November because there's no way he'd hold, much less energize, the base.

However, his successful casting of the election as a referendum on Red Barry's fitness for the presidency over the summer and his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate both threatened to prove me wrong, as on September 15th - the day the Democrat Financial Logic Bomb detonated - Lord Queeg was slightly ahead in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

Maybe it would have lasted, maybe it wouldn't.  But when Wall Street collapsed, all of McCain's worst RINO instincts vomited back to the surface: he aped "Wall Street greed" Donkspeak, failed utterly to get in front of the crisis and truthfully define it as a disaster created by Democrat interventions in the mortgage markets that spread foolhardy risk throughout the financial system like a cancer, and, perhaps worst of all, inserted himself into the negotiations for the hugely unpopular bailout bill thinking he'd be welcomed as a savior and instead got played by the Dems like a ten-cent flute.  Meanwhile, Red Barry prudently kept his distance.

This was one of those "3 AM phone call" moments for Maverick, only it wasn't the "red" phone that was ringing.  It took him three and a half weeks to even BEGIN to start getting it right, and by that time it was "You didn't ask her to the dance, she went with some other guy who married her and now they have six kids and twelve grandchildren" too late.

The lesson of which that reminded the Republican base?  John Sith McCain is not, and has not been for at least a decade, a conservative.  When a crisis arose that revealed his true domestic policy instincts, Maverick did not react as Ronald Reagan would have; he reacted more like Nelson Rockefeller.  He turned against and shafted his own base.  Again.

McCain also botched his best campaign asset and weapon, aka Barracuda, by keeping her under wraps for a month after the GOP convention and then throwing her to the Obamedia jackals in those pre-taped interviews guaranteed that made her look like an idiot.  The veep debate proved Governor Palin could spar with and squash Charlie Gibson, Katie Couric, and any other Obamunist propagandist any day of the week.  Skills that will come in handy starting a couple of years from now, and might have made a difference this time if the old bastard hadn't been too numbskulled to fully utilize them.

***Apart from all of McCain's mistakes was the reality of presidential elections in the mass media age: we put up a tired, crippled, white-haired, charisma-less old man with a high-pitched nasally voice against a young, handsome, articulate-in-front-of-a-teleprompter (and, oh yes, (half) BLACK) man with Hillary Clinton's left-wing orthodoxy, Bill Clinton's charisma, plus the one thing Sick Willie never managed: a zipped fly.

And yet Red Barry only won by three points, and razor-thin margins in the battleground states. 

After four years of race-baiting, cultural extremism, tax-raising, recession, artificial energy crises, homeland terrorist attacks, and strategic disasters and national humiliations abroad - the inevitable results of his professed policy platform - that will shrink his public stature to microscopic proportions, I daresay the "American Thatcher" will provide an entirely new challenge in a dramatically transformed political climate.

Assuming, of course, that there's much of an America left to be salvaged.

Fred Thompson might have averted this future exercise in forensic politics.  John McCain was never going to.

A base lesson that I can guarantee we're destined to forget in oscillating perpetuity.

UPDATE: Dick Morris echoes another of the themes I pointed out months ago:

If ever there was an election that was not worth winning, it was the contest of 2008. While it was hard-fought on both sides, had McCain won, it might have spelled the end of the Republican Party. As it is, the party is well-situated to come back in 2010 and in 2012, if it learns the lessons of this year.

Simply put, all hell is about to break loose in the markets and the economy.

The mortgage crisis will likely be followed by defaults in credit card debt, student loans and car loans. We will probably be set for two years of zero growth, according to economists with whom I talk. And the federal efforts to protect the nation from the worst of the recession will probably lead to huge budget deficits and resulting inflation. We are in for stagflation that could last for years.

Had McCain won, he would be the latter-day Hoover, blamed for the disaster that unfolded on his watch. Now it is Obama's problem. With the Republicans suffering a wipeout in congressional elections (although not as bad as they feared), the ball is now squarely in the Democratic court. Good luck!

Remember what I said about John Major and the British Conservatives barely winning a fourth consecutive term in 1993.  By 1997 the Tories were so hopelessly unpopular that they'd have lost huge no matter who was leading Labor; that it was Tony Blair (the British Bill Clinton) buried them all the way down to third party status and kept them there to this day.  Had McCain managed to prevail, he'd have entered office exhausted, at the head of an exhausted, shrunken party that would nevertheless have been blamed for the recessionary fallout from the Democrat Financial Logic Bomb as much as from the DFLB itself.  It would have been the grand bull-moose gold medal winner of pyrrhic victories.

Instead, in what I freely admit is the application of the lipstick of optimism to the pig of defeat, the Dems now get to reap the economic whirlwind their own policies sewed, and which their unchecked power will now make unbearably worse.  And unlike the Wall Street bailout fiasco, this time it will be Red Barry and the Donk SuperCongress up to their collectivist armpits in it all, while Republicans (if any of them have a brain cell left between them) stand clear, fingerpoint, and cultivate a bumper harvest of political payback in 2010 and 2012.

I also said, quite recently, that I was perfectly balanced between the short term loss/long-term gain scenario above and the horror of the magnitude of comprehensive damage that an unchecked Donk regime could do to America across the policy board.  I ended up doing the "responsible" thing and making myself connect the arrow for McCain.  Which means that I can gleefully and viciously pursue the political ruin of Lucifer and his animal party with a clear conscious.

I'd have preferred Fred Thompson carry our 2008 banner.  It's appalling that this is really, truly that to which we have been reduced.

But it isn't like this is the first time.  And as we learned in 1993-94, when life hands you a lemon....

Excuse the language, but that is the perfect description of Barack Obama. When I saw him giving a press conference behind a dais with a seal on it for the "Office of the President-Elect," I wanted to throw something through the T.V. He just can't wait, can he? The lack of class in this guy is just jaw-dropping.

Another observation...the level of maturity on the right versus the left in defeat. Remember the hate, the absolute viciousness after Bush's victories in 2000 and 2004? And they never let up. Now, read the Corner, Power Line, etc. You will see disappointment, surely, but you will also see well wishes and congratulations to Obama. You do not see the psychotic bile you saw on Democratic Underground, Daily Kos, etc. I must admit to feeling a great deal of animosity towards the fools who put this neophyte in office, but I don't hate them. I'd love to smack some sense into them, but I don't hate them. I'd love to...well, you get the idea.

Well, I'm sure there'll be more moments like this with the Child-in-Chief. That's another thing...what bugs me most is our betrayal of our troops. They have been putting their butts on the line, they have won the war, and we have thanked them by handing over the reins of power to the party which has been trying to legislate their defeat since the beginning of the war.

I better stop, I think my blood pressure is rising...

JASmius adds: I frankly wish our side would muster some "psychotic bile".  Oh, we'd never sustain it to the level and length that the Left did for eight years; frankly even I never imagined that they would do so when we squashed their Florida Insurrection what seems like a lifetime ago.  But speaking for nobody but myself, I have no "well wishes" or "congratulations" for Red Barry.  I cannot congratulate a man who ran a campaign characterized by racism (Remember his not-very-subtle serial "He's a racist" slurs against McCain?), dishonesty (all the flip-flops and pathetic sementical evasions), extremism (his pantheon of racist, communist mentors - and, oh yes, his platform), and corruption (ACORN, as much as half of his $650 million in campaign cash raised illegally).  I cannot "well-wish" a man who wants to communize my country and denude its national defenses against enemies ranging from al Qaeda to nuclear Islamic Iran to the Sino-Russian Axis.  I want to see this man stopped; I want to see this man politically destroyed; it is the only way my country can be saved from the terminal, grievously foolish error it made on Tuesday.

But the Right, apparently, will never do it.  We simply do not have it in us.  We still don't realize that the other side is playing an entirely different game from us.  We are still hopelessly mired in the anachronistic notion that campaigning is for a couple of months every couple of years and the rest of the time is for "governing," and since the other side won they get to govern without any resistance from us, the losers.  We don't get to "get partisan" until long about September of 2010, at which time the country may have been communized beyond recognition.  And that's assuming, of course, that elections are even be allowed anymore.

The "children vs. grown-ups" analogy accurately describes Left vs. Right - ideologically.  But politically, "cutting edge vs. old & obsolete" seems a lot more on target.  And given the harrowing jeopardy into which right-wing tactical obsolescence (among other things) has thrown the nation, we have but a limited time to get with the times and mount the magnitude of billious, relentless, vicious, 24/7/365 campaign it's going to take to re-liberate America before rescuer and rescuee are lost for good.

That's Michael Reagan's advice for the GOP, and it's difficult to argue with him....

UPDATE: Media Lizzy emails this morning that Virginia GOP Congressman Eric Cantor has replaced Missouri's Roy Blunt as House Minority Whip.

Eh, it's a start.  Now if John Boehner would get the hell out of the way and allow John Shadegg to take the GOP leadership reins, perhaps we could get started on the next Republican "revolution".

Remember, Red Barry, there was a Jaws II....

So long, Darth Queeg, and thank you....for settling the question of whether you would have "beaten Al Gore like a drum".....