Electing a Scary Black Man President Isn't the End of the World

Isn’t this a great country? This year’s presidential election proves that anything is possible in America, even a scary black man being elected President of the United States. Whether Obama was elected because of enormous voter fraud, liberal white guilt, an influx of new and ignorant voters or some kind of mass hysteria is not important. For now all Americans should savor this victory for our country and for conservative values.

Some conservatives have gotten the mistaken impression that this election was some kind of repudiation of conservatism, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Thank goodness Michelle Malkin was there to go all Don Corleone and bitchslap the whiney, spineless conservatives who harbored such notions. “I’m getting a lot of moan-y, sad-face ‘What do we do now, Michelle?’ e-mails,” wrote Malkin. But this is no time for self-reflection and mea culpas, Malkin told her minions. “We do not apologize for our beliefs. We do not re-brand them, re-form them, or relinquish them. We defend them.” In other words we must double down on our beliefs no matter how distasteful some Americans find them to be. In fact, Americans were telling us that we weren’t conservative enough, that we need to get back to our core principles by being stingier and more callous. John Derbyshire, lamented that we probably would have won this election if only George Bush had deported 20 million illegal aliens and not visited mosques. But this is no time to regret the past. In fact, conservatives have a lot to be proud of.

For years conservatives have been saying that racism doesn’t exist anymore. The election of Barack Obama proves we were right all along. Throughout the campaign we reminded people at every opportunity that while it might be frightening that Obama is a socialist who pals around with terrorists, probably wasn’t born in this country and is secretly a Muslim, it made no difference whatsoever that he was black. “America actually is more post-racial than most realize,” wrote The Anchoress before the election. “Think about it. Obama can’t break 50%. Neither could Kerry, Gore or Clinton. So, Obama is being treated precisely like every other Democrat politician of the last 16 years. His race is not holding him down. His race is not propping him up. This should be cause for celebration, I think. We’ve clearly moved past race.” So even if Obama had lost the election it would have proven that racism doesn’t exist because white people lost elections, too. Still, some conservatives believe that more could have been done to prove that Obama’s race didn’t matter. Lisa Schifrin points out one of the reasons McCain lost was that he was too squeamish about the race thing and hadn’t yet gotten the word that we live in a post-racial society. “Some McCain aides had felt for a while that their candidate had had a deep reluctance to impede the election of the nation's first African American president. That he had, perhaps, pulled punches and failed to strike as hard as necessary to win this thing, for that greater good,” wrote Schifrin. “All Republicans who watched their candidate these past few months, must have been struck, as I have been, by the sense that he was holding back.” Although it’s true that McCain might have been able to win the election if he believed more strongly that race was irrelevant and brought up issues like Rev. Wright, other conservatives did not share his reluctance and in the end no matter what we threw at Obama, white people voted for him anyway. So with the election of Obama conservatives have been vindicated. Now that we have proved once and for all that racism doesn’t exist and that we live in a post-racial society, we never have to talk about race again. Sometimes you win by losing.

I know many conservatives are frightened by an Obama presidency but there are many reasons for optimism. While this election did not turn out the way we expected, Obama will probably really screw things up (I mean, worse than they already are). It’s not too idealistic to believe he could turn out to be a hopelessly incompetent President, maybe the worst this country has ever seen, and completely run America into the ground. We can already take solace in the fact that Obama has so much to live up to that it will be impossible for him to succeed. “Disillusionment will turn to a feeling of betrayal. And that will, in turn, convert to anger,” wrote Steven Den Beste hopefully. “Our mission for the next four years is to be in opposition without becoming deranged.” So all we have to do is let Obama take this country to hell in a handbasket without looking like we are too crazy. How hard could that be?

Although many conservatives did not appear to realize what an enormous opportunity had been handed to us, they nevertheless accepted the news of Obama’s victory with a stoicism that should make us all proud. “Obama is NOT the Anti-Christ,” wrote Flopping Aces, reassuringly. “The Anti-Christ has an actual plan and millions of years of experience to call upon. Obama the President can claim NONE of these qualities.” Sultan Knish exuded a Zen-like calm as he anticipated the next four years. “Today I unpacked my winter clothes in preparation for a long winter, and a long winter is coming if not of the thermometer, then of the soul,” Sultan wrote with soaring poetic imagery, if not of the anger, then of the sorrow. “A man that represents not simply an opposing view but the view of those who oppose America and all it stands for, will sit in the Oval Office. Worse still he did not get there through a democratic election but through fraud, voter intimidation and every dirty trick culminating in a campaign that had little in common with conventional American politics and a great deal in common with the cults of personality cultivated by totalitarian dictators.” Atlas Shrugs waxed poetic, too, transforming herself into a Jewish, orthographically challenged e.e. cummings: “he says he is a democrat. i think he does so to hide that he is a committed marxist leninist who intends to impose a marxist dictatorhip upon this country, which advancig the interests of islam. he will attempt to either impose or import sharia, and sharia financing into this country. he is not my president. i do not accept him we have no deals, mr. obama and i, as he has vitiated them by a fundamental and far reaching fraud. he has evil designes and intents upon me and mine, upon thee and me.”

Obama’s epic fail of an administration will make President Bush’s term look brilliant by comparison. Unfortunately, President Bush has not gotten the respect and appreciation he deserves for keeping America safe after 9/11, protecting all of our other cities besides New Orleans and keeping our economy strong until the financial crisis. Pat Boone, who had such a wonderful career turning crude African-American noise into nice, wholesome Christian music (maybe he could revive his career by re-recording some of Obama’s speeches and doing the same for him), recently shared a very amusing and creative “Bush Resignation Letter” in which Bush explains how great he was to all the ingrates. “I'm fed up with you people,” the faux Bush says. “I'm fed up because you have no understanding of what's really going on in the world – or of what's going on in this once-great nation of ours. And the majority of you are too damn lazy to do your homework and figure it out.” The Wall Street Journal has already begun assigning blame for the Bush Administration’s problems where it belongs: to the American people. In an editorial titled “The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace,” Jeffrey Shapiro writes, “The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems.…Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty -- a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.” Of course, Mr. Shapiro and other conservatives will always stand by President Obama no matter how bad a President he is because we aren’t disloyal like liberals are. Obama will have to fail on his own without our help. Then we can all say, “I told you so.” I don’t know how much an Obama administration will have to screw up to make the Bush Administration look good, but we can all keep our fingers crossed.

Another bright spot in the election was that the success of Proposition 8 showed that while Americans are colorblind, they still hate gay people, even in California. In addition to Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California, similar propositions in Florida and Arizona succeeded and Arkansas passed a resolution banning the practice of forcing orphans to live with gay parents instead of in nice, comfortable orphanages. Conservatives should make vilifying gays the centerpiece of our platform in the coming years since it obviously still works. In fact, Proposition 8 got its strongest support from blacks and Hispanics, so once they get over the novelty of having a minority in the White House, we may be able to use this issue to win them over to the conservative cause.

Lost in the drama of election night coverage was the fact that Gabriel Malor, one of the pseudononymous co-bloggers on the blog of CPAC Blogger of the Year Ace of Spades, chose this night to come out of the closet and was duly slapped down by conservatives sticking to their principles. “Could we have a moment of silence for those poor fools who were happily married or engaged yesterday and today are finding out that they don't have squat?” Malor wrote. “Prop 8 was much more personal than some silly high-speed train or hospital funding. People are hurting today. And I'm one of them.” Commenters at Ace of Spades, where ribald anti-gay humor has always been one the features that makes the blog so delightful, were shocked. “Did Gabe just come out of the closet?” exclaimed A Different Dave in Texas. Apotheosis did his best to take it in stride with a nervous attempt at humor: “I'm sorry you're hurting, Gabriel. I'd offer you a hug, but...y'know. Just a beer or something, man? We're cool, right?” But while some commenters offered him sympathy, others stuck to their core conservative principles. “Wow. I'm really hurting for all the guy who want to marry their sisters. The gals who want to marry their Doberman Pinschers. The pain. The hurt,” wrote Dang sarcastically. “I'm not a hard hearted person, but I'm also not going to lose sleep about the democratic process working to the disappointment of some. That's just the f---ing breaks,” said Nom de Blog. Moronizer was having none of it: “So you got ‘married,’ knowing full well that it might get voided. Boo hoo.” And Religious Zealot wanted Malor to stop acting so gay about it: “I don't deny that Gabe and others are hurting, it's just that it's a drama-queen reaction.” I hope that in the coming days the bloggers at Ace of Spades will redouble their efforts to make fun of gays lest people start speculating about the sexual preference of the other co-bloggers and regular commenters there. Better to nip this thing in the bud before it spreads.

Even though Ace of Spades was not able to have any effect whatsoever on the election, it wasn’t for lack of trying. And Ace of Spades will continue to be the go-to blog as conservatives grapple with their principles in this brave new world. If there is one thing that distinguishes conservatives from liberals it’s that we don’t believe in demonizing our opponents unless it’s absolutely necessary. “McCain lost honorably, as he wanted. I guess that's what really matters in the end,” Ace of Spades wrote after the results came. Ace of Spades never lost his honor or dignity even as he did his best to warn Americans that they were about to elect someone who was “the same kind of socialist race hustler as Jesse Jackson,” was so close to terrorists that one even wrote his book for him and had a mistress that the mainstream media refused to report on no matter how much he tried to push the story. Now Ace and his "moronbloggers," as they call themselves, will lead the way in showing why conservatives are better than liberals. “I love this country too much to do to President-Elect Obama what the left did to President Bush, John McCain and Sarah Palin. We’re better than that,” wrote Ace’s co-blogger Slublog. “Demonization is not essential to opposition.” Conservatives can try other things, too.

Of course, conservatives are not going to be afraid to give President Obama constructive criticism when necessary, while we wait for 2012, when we can all get behind the Sarah Palin/Dan Quayle ticket (yes you can say you heard it here first: Palin will be the Republican nominee in 2012 and she will select Dan Quayle as her running mate to add experience and gravitas to the ticket). When Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992, Bob Dole famously said "Good news is, Clinton's on his honeymoon. Bad news is, his chaperone is Bob Dole." That was before the Internet. President Obama is going to have the whole conservative blogosphere as his chaperone.

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