Sadly, No!

Ezra Klein is my homeboy, but yeah, this is over-the-top:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

Call me a cynic if you must, but Obama is a politician. I’m not looking for politicians to be my friends, or to make me into a better person, or to give my life meaning. Hell, I’ve got beer for all three of those things.

What I am looking for is a politician that can be influenced to make certain policy changes that I endorse. Like, I dunno, ending the Iraq war. Or, uh, providing national health insurance. Or maybe, just maybe, lessening the influence that big business has over our government. When you start talking about politicians like they’re anything more than tools to be used to further goals, you’re setting yourself up to get horribly punk’d. Put it to you this way: what you wrote above sounds a lot like how John Hinderaker talks about Bush, how Peggy Noonan talks about Reagan or how K-Lo talks about Romney. And while Obama is obviously better than those three guys in just about every conceivable way, that doesn’t make him otherworldly. Repeat after cynical old Brad: he is just a politician.

…and on an unrelated note, this is sad.

HTML adds: Lambert’s post is a nice antidote to Ezra’s vapid idolatry.

Remember those heady days after the 2004 presidential elections when liberals were chided as coastal elites who were being punished by the electorate for mocking the heartland and its treasured traditional values? Remember when those folksy Christian Midwesterners were endlessly praised for their quiet resolve to support their godly President Bush and reject the sissy-assed negativism of the traitorous liberal establishment? Remember when Bush media advisers were fond of saying things like this:

”You think [Bush]’s an idiot, don’t you?… All of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don’t care. You see, you’re outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don’t read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it’s good for us. Because you know what those folks don’t like? They don’t like you!”

Well, that was then and this, as they say, is now. When the Republicans’ Christianist sect decided that it was sick and tired of being played for fools by its own party, its adherents decided to throw their support behind one of their own. And because this particular candidate doesn’t show the same enthusiasm for tax-cutting and war-mongering that Mitt Romney and Rudy Guliani do, the GOP establishment is freaking the hell out. Here’s Stephen Green talking about the God-fearing heartlanders that make up the GOP’s base:

Dear Iowa Republicans,

I’ll put this in language even your tiny little Iowa brains can understand: What the f*** is wrong with you people?

The news coming out of Des Moines (literally, French for “tell me about the rabbits, George”) tonight is distressing in the extreme. 32 years ago, your Democratic brethren took one look at Jimmy Carter — the worst 20th Century President bar Nixon, and the worst ex-President ever — and declared, “That’s our man!”

Three decades later, and along comes Mike Huckabee. Same moral pretentiousness, same gullibility on foreign affairs, only-slightly-less toothy idiot’s grin. Then you so-called Republicans took a look at Carter’s clone and said, “That’s our man, too!”

And by a pretty wide margin. […]

Mike Huckabee? Really? We’ve seen this game before, and its name is… every other single stupid, un-winnable candidate you’ve ever picked — which is most of them.

So I repeat the question: What is wrong with you people?

All my love, you corn-sucking idiots,

VodkaPundit

Feel the love, friends. I can’t wait to see Green’s taxes* get raised after ’08. It will make me LOL and will be, well and truly, too funny forever.

GO HUCK GO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

UPDATE: Credit where due. This is a pretty funny remark from one of Green’s readers:

Huckabee is the SuperCuts version of John Edwards.

* Gavin adds: Green, a double-barreled ass, is wealthy by inheritance.

Ah, Rudy:

He flatlined in Iowa and he’s struggling in New Hampshire, but Rudy Giuliani shook off the early-state blues Thursday as only he can.

“None of this worries me – Sept. 11, there were times I was worried,” Giuliani said.

You almost get the feeling that 9/11 was the happiest day of his life, the SOB mentions it so much…

Those of you wondering how Hooty Hugh Hewitt, who approximately a year and a half ago anointed Mitt Romney the NEXT PRESIDENT OF THESE UNITED STATES, would spin the Iowa caucus victory of Mike Huckabee — well, here’s Hewitt flunky/Bush 2004 web nerd Patrick Ruffini to explain it all to you.

Above: ‘You see, the American voter is weak and soft, like this adorable puppy…boy, I sure am hungry all of a sudden.’

The problem is that Iowa voters are like a giggling, hysterical woman, or a pretty pink flower: they used their useless, fragile emotions to decide who to vote for instead of the cold, precise Vulcan logic that has held sway in all previous presidential elections.

Count on voters to decide with their hearts, not with their heads. 2004 was all about momentum vs. organization. 2008 was about candidates of the heart vs. the head.

Hardly 12 hours have passed since they called the vote, and Patrick’s already got his storyline. Well done! But wait, wasn’t 2004 all about values? Ahhh, screw it, history is increasingly written not by the winners but by the whiners.

Clinton and Romney had well-reasoned closing arguments centering around their fitness for the office, which should be the bottom line in any normal election. But in Iowa, the pull of identity, of gut decisions, and of emotion, won the day.

I’m going to go ahead and assume that since Patrick claims that fitness for office and well-reasoned closing arguments are the bottom line in any normal election, we have never, ever had a normal election in this country, and we never will. I mean, I hate to make my jokes too obvious here, but this is a guy who was a central component of Bush/Cheney ’04, here, arguing that in a normal election, fitness for office and well-reasoned debate should carry the day.

This was a vote about identity, about people voting for someone like them, not about issues.

Well, sure! That certainly explains Obama’s win, right? Because who is a state like Iowa, with its rural, Christian, 94.6% white population, going to identify with more than a black man from the third-largest city in America who was educated in Indonesia? Clearly, identity politics carried the day.

Of course, I can’t really blame the GOP establishment for being freaked out at Huckabee’s success. I’m highly amused at the possibility of massive seizures amongst the Republican elite if he actually snags the endorsement, but if he somehow manages to win, well, that will pretty much mean that America would rather elect a mop with a bucket for a head than a Democrat.

Above: Clearly not descended from a monkey

CNN is calling Iowa for Obama and for Huckabee.

I predict much wailing and gnashing of teeth and sobbing into cartons of Chubby Hubby while gazing longingly at the Tiger Beat pull-out poster of Fred Thomspon at chez Lopez tonight.

Anyone else watching the Iowa results come in?

Update: If this doesn’t surface in the media at some point in the campaign, I will be sorely disappointed:

Seb adds: Apparently the Huckabee campaign also contributed to the International Herald Tribune (though they’ve fixed the online version):

What Does “Family Friendly” Mean?

• “Ugly Betty” could have been a sweet family show about a moral Mexican girl in the fashion industry, but the networks had to go and ruin it by adding a bunch of fags and a 12-year-old girly-boy.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Back in the day — way, way back in the day, all the way to that time when Pete M. and The Dark Window were around, Pete and I had come up with the idea of creating a faux wingnut who would get a column published by The Rant, aka The New Media Journal. Did that work out for us? Hell yeah, old school wingnuttery, Stanton Carlisle-style. We remain fond of that column — it had such great lines as:

The simple fact (and one that is more plainly evident than an ACLU lawyer at a NAMBLA convention) is that France and Germany have no more loyalty to our United States than Al Gore does to sanity. Both countries can be counted on for only one thing: planning against American interests with the same energy and enthusiasm as Michael Moore set free at the opening of a new Krispy Kreme donuts!

Good times, good times. While Stanton died an early death, he had written a second column which never made it onto the internets — and in the spirit of not letting our work go to waste, we offer this “classic” from 2004. The sad part is, it reads like a real The Rant/Renew America column. (Which is why most smart people assume that Carey Roberts’ columns are actually written by Pandagon’s Amanda Marcotte.) This one’s for you, Pete.
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And if so, did your room offer this?

Rudy Giuliani TV Ad “Ready”

• SAND PEOPLE! VIOLENT AND WICKED SAAAAAAAND PEOPLE!! WANT TO KILL YOU!!! KIIIIIILLLLL YOOOOOOOU!!!! WILL STEAL YOUR SUV AND FLATSCREEN TV!!!! WILL FORCE YOU TO EAT VEGETABLES AND EXERCISE!!!!!! RUDY STRONG!!!!! RUDY STRONG!!!!!

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Conan O’Brien isn’t the only one who can look into the future. As we learned today, it turns out that one Donald Hank can as well:

The choice between these two must be made quickly and decisively in America, because time is running out, as we can gauge by the breathtaking speed at which our European counterparts lost their nationhood.

Yes, Donald argues that we in Europe lost our nationhood.
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