James G. Wiles, in the Philadelphia Bulletin, asks “what would Rahm Emanuel do if he had Congressman John Boehner’s job as House Minority Leader?”

That’s easy. Put as many long-range torpedoes into the water aimed at Senator Obama’s ship of state before Republicans lose control of the Executive Branch as possible. Here are a few:

Appoint U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Patrick Fitzpatrick as a special prosecutor so he can pursue his investigation of Tony Rezko and his corrupt dealings with Illinois’s governor and other creatures and spoilsmen of the Daley Machine. This will make it politically difficult for a President Obama to pardon Mr. Rezko and impossible for him to terminate Mr. Fitzpatrick as a federal officer come January 21 as a way of de-railing this investigation.

Appoint a special prosecutor to investigate ACORN’s voter registration methods and its dealings with the Obama campaign.

Appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Obama campaign’s on-line fundraising operation, including its disabling of the credit card security software on its on-line donations system. File a complaint with the Federal Election Commission regarding same.

Appoint a bipartisan (love that word!) presidential commission to review the candidates’ fundraising in this election cycle and to recommend changes in federal election laws.

File ethics complaints against Sen. Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank for their relationship with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Countrywide Mortgage.

Be it noted that, in his day, this is probably what Newt Gingrich would have done, too. It was then-Congressman Gingrich’s persistent filing of ethics complaints against then-House Speaker Jim Wright, D Texas, which eventually brought Speaker Wright down and made possible the Republicans’ re-taking of Congress in 1994 on the platform of the Contract with America.

Who needs a honeymoon anyway? Not Rahm Emanuel.

Too bad George W. Bush is likely to do none of the above.

I wonder how much they contributed to the campaign.

New York Times:

The leader of a jihadi group in Iraq argued Friday that the election of Barack Obama as president represented a victory for radical Islamic groups that had battled American forces since the invasion of Iraq.

The statement, which experts said was part of the psychological duel with the United States, was included in a 25-minute audiotaped speech by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella organization that claims ties to Al Qaeda. Mr. Baghdadi’s statement was posted on a password-protected Web site called Al Hesbah, used to disseminate information to Islamic radicals.

In his address, Mr. Baghdadi also said that the election of Mr. Obama — and the rejection of the Republican candidate, Senator John McCain — was a victory for his movement, a claim that has already begun to resonate among the radical faithful. In so doing Mr. Baghdadi highlighted the challenge the new president would face as he weighed how to remove troops from Iraq without also giving movements like Al Qaeda a powerful propaganda tool to use for recruiting.

“And the other truth that politicians are embarrassed to admit,” Mr. Baghdadi said, “is that their unjust war on the houses of Islam, with its heavy and successive losses and the continuous operations of exhaustion of your power and your economy, were the principal cause of the collapse of the economic giant.”

Iowahawk celebrates the restoration of America’s popularity with socialist European weenies and shares in the joy felt at the election of America’s first black president by the enemies of the United States everywhere.

Although I have not always been the most outspoken advocate of President-Elect Barack Obama, today I would like to congratulate him and add my voice to the millions of fellow citizens who are celebrating his historic and frightening election victory. I don’t care whether you are a conservative or a liberal — when you saw this inspiring young African-American rise to our nation’s highest office I hope you felt the same sense of patriotic pride that I experienced, no matter how hard you were hyperventilating with deep existential dread.

Yes, I know there are probably other African-Americans much better qualified and prepared for the presidency. Much, much better qualified. Hundreds, easily, if not thousands, and without any troubling ties to radical lunatics and Chicago mobsters. Gary Coleman comes to mind. But let’s not let that distract us from the fact that Mr. Obama’s election represents a profound, positive milestone in our country’s struggle to overcome its long legacy of racial divisions and bigotry. It reminds us of how far we’ve come, and it’s something everyone in our nation should celebrate in whatever little time we now have left.

Less than fifty years ago, African-Americans were barred from public universities, restaurants, and even drinking fountains in many parts of the country. On Tuesday we came together and transcended that shameful legacy, electing an African-American to the country’s top job — which, in fact, appears to be his first actual job. Certainly, it doesn’t mean that racism has disappeared in America, but it is an undeniable mark of progress that a majority of voters no longer consider skin color nor a dangerously gullible naivete as a barrier to the presidency. …

It’s obvious that this newfound pride is not confined to Americans alone. All across the world, Mr. Obama’s election has helped mend America’s tattered image as a racist, violent cowboy, willing to retaliate with bombs at the slightest provocation. The huge outpouring of international support following the election shows that America can still win new friendships while rebuilding its old ones, and provides Mr. Obama with unprecedented diplomatic leverage over our remaining enemies. When Russian tanks start pouring into eastern Europe and Iranian missiles begin raining down on Jerusalem, their leaders will know they will be facing a man who not only conquered America’s racial divide but the hearts of the entire Cannes film community. And those Al Qaeda terrorists plotting a dirty nuke or chemical attack on San Francisco face a stark new reality: while they may no longer need to worry about US Marines, they are looking down the barrel of a strongly worded diplomatic condemnation by a Europe fully united in their deep sympathy for surviving Americans.

Read the whole thing.

From the Onion:

2:39 video

Hat tip to Daniel Lowenstein.

“David Smithee” is rejoicing over Obama’s election, taking the view that the democrats have overreached and we’ve got them where we want them. They’ve got their leftist president and a Congressional majority. Now they can try governing from the left, and just watch what happens to them.

As ancient Israel whined to have monarchs rule over them to be like their pagan neighbours, so too are American leftists smitten with the illusory sophistication of the crumbling European economic and social models. They salivate for the esteem of tyrants, socialists, and every manner of grandiose failure; the more extravagant, the better so long as the mission statement is sufficiently lofty. It’s said that liberals are like any other people; only moreso. In this case, it’s their turn to perpetuate the ancient cycle of rejecting what works, turning their backs with disdain on America’s incomparable blessings and crying “Give us what they have!”

Well, we’ve gotten it.

In a receding economy and aided by a political monopoly, President Obama is going to prove unable to resist his fetish for increased taxation and eco-regulatory strangulation. In a dangerous time, his vanity will lead him to grant legitimacy to nations that wish America ill. When an Obama presidency with majorities in the House and Senate ends in economic calamity, emboldened international foes, or both — as history wearily tells us it must — then the healing can begin.

This is a true changing of the guard in more ways than one, as it also signals the end of the Moderate. Trashing his own party only served McCain for so long. The Maverick was devoured by his Media base the moment he became inconvenient, and timorous pseudo-conservatives have jumped ship to ensure they remained on the right side of the DC sophistication line. Classical conservatives would be well served to let them flounder.

Yet I admit my own relief, despite the costs we will bear in the short term, that Obama was the victor.

For the Democrats, it was an act of sublime short-term calculation to trot out Obama. A man whose easy, telegenic charm was able to narcotize into irrelevance all the facts that would have rendered him unelectable in anyone else’s skin. The sewage of slum lords, communist sympathizers and domestic terrorists swirl about his ankles. And yet a flash of smile and a few words in his soothing baritone captured the American imagination and soothed a majority of the electorate. But now the work is going to start. Results are going to matter, and if there’s one fact about Barry that the media was unable to obscure, it’s that he is a candidate truly uncluttered by moderation.

He is the proto-Democrat; liberalism’s gleaming new flagship. And that’s going to be a long-term problem for Democrats in ways they can scarcely now imagine. …

Obama is not just a Democrat, or a liberal. Obama is liberalism. He is liberalism stripped of all of its false fronts of civic mindedness. Shorn of all its bogus declarations of interest in the public good, or lip service to free markets or property rights. He is liberalism as it exists only in the psyche of the petty tyrant, rarely glimpsed emerging in public. Shrieking, demanding as a newborn, nakedly ravenous for power. Worshipping expedience, debasing of life, and viewing everyone else’s wealth as his own, with which he may conduct his vast social experiments on the subdued human landscape.

But as an ideological flagship surrounded by hysterically unrealistic expectations, if he fails, Obama is going to drag the Democrat ship down to truly crushing depths. And when he does, the redemption of the Democrats will not be swift in coming. With Obama, they have bet the ideological farm, and several surrounding properties too. They have damned the torpedoes and abandoned the strategy of advancing themselves in managed increments. By pushing Obama into the spotlight, they’re tipping their entire ideological hand a good twenty years ahead of schedule.

Good piece. Read the whole thing.

Nibras Kazimi predicts Islamic jubilation over Obama’s victory will, in the not very distant future, change into hostility.

For now, Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East see two things in Obama: to them he’s a walking, talking apology, and an infiltrator. He’s an apology for the Bush years; America’s gift basket to the rest of the world for the fault of protecting itself. The hatred that has been whipped up against President George Bush by the Arab media—much of it owned and directed by America’s alleged allies, the Saudis and other Persian Gulf dynasties—has been unprecedented, much like the adulation presently, and temporarily, being given to Obama. However, Arab and Muslim fascination with Obama rests on the idea that he is their Trojan horse into the highest office in America, the gleeful whispers describe him at times to be a secret Muslim, and in another light, an ‘anti-imperialist’ leftist.

Obama will not only apologize for America’s imperial pretension, but shall work to reverse it. So the lofty expectations go.

But there are two powerful opinion makers in the region that cannot afford to do away with the convenience of hating on America and its leaders, and those would be the ruling regimes and their most ferocious enemies, the jihadists. A popular Obama is dangerous since it deprives both camps of a distraction, a focus for white-hot rage; for the regimes, anti-Americanism, like anti-Zionism, is a most useful tool for deflating the wrath of the gathering mob, a mob whose numbers will swell as the world becomes poorer and resources turn scarcer, and oil profits are bled, while the jihadists need the seething anger to enlarge their recruitment pool. The faster that Obama can be turned into a hated figure, the quicker that matters revert to how things were.

Adding to their anxiety is the likelihood that Bush’s policy for spreading democracy will be adopted by the starry-eyed Democrats carried into power, albeit with some important modifications, namely on the question of who is an Arab or Muslim moderate. For these newly minted masters of policy, the reflexive and ultimately mistaken answer lies in the ranks of political Islam, and specifically the trunk and many offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, a group feared and despised by both the regimes and the jihadists.

So the task at hand for these regimes and jihadists is to turn any association with Obama into an embarrassment, and that would be by transforming his strengths into liabilities.

And that’s pretty easy to do: Obama will be pitched as a proselytizing Christian infiltrator into the land of Islam, rather than a secret Muslim in the White House. Obama the apostate had turned his back on his Islamic birthright and early childhood for the opportunism afforded by Christianity, and that is America’s grand plan for fixing the Middle East: turning it Christian—or so goes the conspiracy theory.

History tells us that nothing riles up the masses of Nejd, Damascus, Cairo, and Istanbul like the fear that Christians are out to convert Muslims. It is only a matter of time before Obama’s biography, once thought to be the harbinger of international goodwill, will be distorted into yet another reason to hate America.

Ben Shapiro thinks the undecideds went for Obama’s empty slogans and fake emotions simply because they were tired of all the partisan bickering.

The Great Election of 2008 is over. Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States.

Now is the time to ask what this election was about.

Here’s what this election was (set ital) not (end ital) about: Barack Obama. It was not about his record: He didn’t have one. It was not about his views, which are radical in the extreme. It was not about his associations: Americans didn’t care about Wright, Ayers, or Khalidi. The media didn’t want Americans to know about Obama. Obama didn’t want Americans to know about Obama. And Americans didn’t want to know about Obama.

This election was not about John McCain. No one cared about McCain, except the liberal media that nominated him president after one win in New Hampshire.

This election was not about President George W. Bush. Bush was used as a punching bag by both sides — and by election time, he was completely irrelevant.

And this election was certainly not about the issues. In the general election, Barack Obama campaigned as a centrist, titularly abandoning his more extreme positions to do so. He lied about his policies. And no one cared.

This election was about one thing and one thing only: Americans’ puerile need for unity through self-congratulatory, cathartic membership in a broad, transformative political movement.

For eight years, Americans have been engaged in hostile politics. And after eight years, Americans were sick of it.

That isn’t to America’s credit. Hostile politics — hard-fought political conflict over the issues that matter — is not a bad thing. It is precisely the sort of messy republicanism the founders embraced. Early elections were replete with mudslinging, character assassination, brawls and scandals. They were also replete with some of the most substantive debate on policy ever put before mankind.

Apparently, we’re no longer interested in the dirty business of politics. We’d rather feel ourselves part of a high-minded movement. Not the sort of movement that espouses particular policies — not the antiwar movement, or the pro-life movement — those movements are too divisive. We want to be part of a movement that is solely about us.

Barack Obama was the vessel for that movement. He was an utter cipher. But he embodied the need of the American public for unity by hearkening back to the ultimate unifying feature of American life: third-grade slogans. He spouted Hope and Change. He told us, “We’re All Americans.” He told us, “Yes, We Can.”

Neal Boortz identifies yesterday’s election’s predominant theme.

I brought this up several months ago … a slogan for this election. “I want my mommy.” The phrase really says it all. This is not an election where the American voters were looking for someone to protect their freedoms. Instead, it was an election where people were looking for someone to take care of them. Self-sufficiency seems a bit old-fashioned right now. Why work so hard to be self-sufficient when candidates are falling all over themselves to provide the American people with womb-to-tomb or, if you will, cradle-to-grave paternalism. The voters who put Barack Obama into office bear little resemblance to the people who fought for independence 124 years ago. Colonists fighting for our independence actually left their bloody footprints along the icy roads of New York and Pennsylvania while marching to engage the British troops. Today we can’t even drum of a decent plurality of voters who will vote for liberty, let alone fight for it.

This has been a “what’s in it for me” vote. Are you going to give me health care? Are you going to make sure my job is guaranteed? Are you going to cover my child care costs? You aren’t going to make me pay taxes, are you? How about all those evil rich people? Aren’t you going to take some of their money away from them and give it to me? After all … I work for my money, they cheated and stole for theirs. Make them pay their fair share of taxes. Me? I’m tired of paying any share.

The big question for me today is whether or not freedom, economic liberty and self-sufficiency can make a comeback in America. Right now it seems that a dismaying number of Americans think that they are owed a living; that it is the government’s job to guarantee their economic security. Can we ever turn that around and return to a time when people accept the responsibility for their own lives and eschew the idea of using government as a tool of legalized plunder?

Now that it’s over, Bill Ayers condescends to speak to the press.

Ayers said he blames what he called liberal media outlets for failing to dismiss Obama’s acquaintance with him as a case of guilt by association, likening it to the way the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth created a narrative that helped doom Sen. John F. Kerry four years ago.

“The dishonest narrative is that guilt by association has some validity,” Ayers said, saying the performance of the media was “kind of shameful.”

One day last summer, Ayers said, he received two threats on his office computer while he was in his downtown office. One said a posse was coming to shoot him; another said a gang would kidnap and waterboard him.

A university police officer who had known Ayers for years arrived and told him, “Gosh, I hope the guy who’s coming to shoot you gets here first.”

John Derbyshire is in a bad mood this morning.

Just watched Wonder Boy’s speech. Hmph. “Callused hands?” When did he ever have callused hands?

All right, I’m sour. The most liberal member of the U.S. Senate! And that shakedown-artist of a wife, with the permanent frown! And Joe Biden! …

I’m sour about the GOP too. What did it all get us, those 8 years of pandering and spending? If GWB had turned his face against new entitlements, closed the borders, deported the illegals, held the line on calls to loosen mortgage-lending standards, starved the Department of Education, and declined those invitations to mosque functions, would the GOP be in any worse shape now?

What won this election was the packaging skills of David Axelrod, the swooning complicity of the media, the ruthless opportunism of Barack Obama, and the unprincipled thuggishness of his supporters.

What lost this election was the cloth-eared cluelessness of George W. Bush, the timid squeamishness of John McCain, and the deep lack of interest in conservative principles among Republican primary voters.

Sour? You bet I’m sour. Where was conservatism in this election? Where was restraint in government? Where was national sovereignty? Where was liberty? Where was self-support? And where are those things now? Where are they headed this next four years? Down the toilet, that’s where. Pah!

A French genealogy site lists Obama’s descent from the Piast kings of Poland via the Plantagenet Kings of England.

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Hat tip to Kaj Malachowski.

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In addition to sharing ancestry with Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, Barack Obama shares ancestry with Juliette Gordon Low (founder of the Girl Scouts), British Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan, Lord George Curzon, US Presidents James Madison, Lyndon B. Johnson, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, General Robert E. Lee, Governors Howard Dean and Sarah Palin, Senators Birch Bayh and John Glenn, writers Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Ken Kesey, artist Georgia O’Keefe, cartoonist Charles Addams, movie stars Katherine Hepburn, Lon Chaney, Robert Duvall, Christopher Reeve, and Brad Pitt, singers Loudoun Wainwright and Justin Timberlake.

Mark Steyn extends congratulations.

Just to be clear: I’m not indulging in the same somewhat moist-eyed congratulations as some of our colleagues. I extend my congratulations mainly in the same sense that elderly British veterans of my acquaintance like to express their admiration of the marvelously innovative ways their Japanese captors found to torture them. The President-elect ran rings round our side, and found many novel ways to torture us.