Today is the third inaugural day of my lifetime, when the White House switched from Republican to Democrat.
History does not repeat itself in a neat, organized way, only a general way; and besides, "history repeats itself" is not an accurate description of events--"humans make the same mistakes over and over again, with the same sorts of consequences" is a better description, I think.
The Incompetent One and the Impeached One came to the White House enjoying substantial majorities in Congress. The Incompetent One managed to retain Congress in the elections of 1978, but with significant erosion, and of course the Impeached One lost Congress in the elections of 1994.
This is NOT to say it is reasonable to expect the Republicans to do well in the mid-term elections of 2010--one of my new year's resolutions was to give up predicting elections--but it is to say that if 0bama makes the same mistakes his Democrat predecessors did, the consequences will probably perhaps be the same.
The main mistake the Incompetent One made, 1977-1981, was his attitude that some people "didn't count;" such as, say, decent hardworking conservative law-abiding citizens of the south adhering to a particular religious denomination, whose concerns and values were all but ignored, even though one of theirs was president.
The best way to make an enemy of a man is by telling him he "doesn't count."
(nota bene: primitives don't count.)
It was not Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson or Jesse Helms or whoever else was charged, who created the "religious right;" it was James Carter.
For every action, there is an equally-strong reaction.
A basic fundamental law of physics.
It would be good for the 0bamaites and the 0bamaite primitives to remember this, but one doubts they will.
We are not coming upon any sort of a "new age;" we are eyewitnessing the decline and death of the Age of Aquarius, which has been the "establishment" since the mid-1970s.
What happens to a star just before it collapses into a black hole? It suddenly, abruptly, expands in size, enormously so, and blinds in its increased brightness.....and then in a millisecond, is gone.
Of course, some sort of "new age" is coming, but I'm hesitant to speculate its nature; what it might be. It seems to me this "new age" will be dawning with another terrorist attack on American civilian soil; a suitcase nuclear device in New York City, a 13-gallon plastic trash-bag filled with cyanide dumped into the water supply of Chicago, a deadly biological epidemic begun in San Francisco; that sort of thing.
It is not necessary to actually invade and conquer a land and people to subjugate them; if such were so, the British Empire could not have been, and the British Empire lasted 400 years. It is only necessary to intimidate, to cow.
0bama is a Democrat, and how he responds to such an inevitable attack will determine the "new age." It is common to suppose, he being a Democrat, he will try to accommodate, compromise with, appease, and capitulate to, those who seek our destruction.
It's not an unreasonable speculation.
However, I think it's equally possible another sort of reaction might happen.
Democrats, even in Democrat "election victory years," are correctly perceived by the general public as "weak" on national defense, and they are sorely aware of this.
It's something that bothers them very much.
The history of the 20th century showed us that Republican presidents were timid, hesitant, about applying warfare when all other means of resolution were blocked, perhaps because of their own insecurities about being thought "trigger happy."
Remember the "rush to war" that took.....two years?
The history of the 20th century also showed us that Democrat presidents, when backed into a corner, overreacted, with an intensity and a fury that was too much, really, for the cause. Vietnam was a good example, as was that night the Impeached One in late 1998, dumped more bombs on Baghdad than the combined firepower used by both sides all during the six years of the second world war; in a few hours.
I have no doubt that if Hillary Clinton, and not 0bama, were the incoming president, once this new terrorist attack took place on American soil, there would not be left standing a single stone upon another stone, in all the capitals, with the exception of Jerusalem and New Delhi, from Rabat to Djakarta, a wide band of utter destruction around the globe, in an attempt to prove Democrats are not "weak" on national defense.
With 0bama, I'm not quite so sure, but I'm about 50% sure that's what he'd do.
In either case--servile capitulation or violent overreaction--the misbegotten Age of Aquarius collapses into a black hole, and some sort of "new age" dawns.
All we can do is sit back, wait, and watch.
