So what now?

Oscar Wilde, the inspiration behind this blog's name, once said, "There are two tragedies in life. One is not getting what you want. The other is getting it."

I started this blog on July 31, 2004, the day after the first Kerry/Bush debate. I started blogging because there is only so much ranting that one spouse should have to cope with, and Mr. Brilliant was having to cope with it on an almost nonstop basis. I didn't start this blog to make money (because if I had, I'd be out on the street now). I didn't even start it to build traffic, though I have to admit that it's sometimes been difficult to slave away for the same 500 page views a day for four years. It's picked up some of late, and I've been gratified by the many people I've met who say they lurk even if they don't comment. If there is a side motive to why I blog, it's so that people I know who aren't political junkies and who get their news from television have a place to go where they can find out things they won't get from the mainstream media. Because for the last eight years, the media has dutifully carried water for George W. Bush, and was carrying water for "war hero" "maverick" "straight talker" John McCain until his campaign's utter ineptitude and his own failings as a candidate made it impossible to do so any longer.

Now we have a new president-elect, one of our own party. We have a president-elect who represents something more than just a switch of power to one that's been out of power, because Barack Obama is also a symbol of something good about this country -- that it IS possible for Americans to look beyond just fear and loathing and take a leap of faith that might offer something better. That's the good news.

The bad news is that despite the miserable stewardship of the Bush Administration over the last eight years, despite John McCain seemingly having lost some of his cognitive faculties, despite Sarah Palin's ugly, ignorant hatemongering, Barack Obama still only won this election by six million votes in a year when a candidate as charismatic, as intelligent, as calming as he is should have routed the neanderthal agenda of McCain/Palin by tens of millions of votes.

The bad news is also that Rahm Emanuel is going to be Barack Obama's chief of staff. That's the same Rahm Emanuel whose motto in states like Virginia and Florida and Ohio was the lesson Homer Simpson teaches Bart: "Can't win...don't try." That's the same Rahm Emanuel who tried to purge Howard Dean from the latter's chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee.

The bad news is also that the odious Steny Hoyer is still in a power position in the House. The bad news is that Darcy Burner is not in the House at all. The House and Senate are still loaded with too many "blue dog Democrats", and Joe Lieberman seems to still have Harry Reid's balls in a vise.

I said before this election that we have five minutes to celebrate, and then it's back to work. Well, our five minutes are up.

So where do we go from here? Cernig posted yesterday about blogging the Obama Administration. Newshoggers has a clearer mission than many of us do, because their focus is on foreign policy, and with the mainstream media seemingly unable to think in anything other than shades of black and white, blogs like Newshoggers really ARE going to be an alternative. But the soul searching seems to be going on all over the blogosphere (as Cernig notes), and it all points to one very clear reality and one very clear answer:

We will criticize this new Administration when necessary, because that is what we do. We are not like Republicans, jumping through hoops to justify the worst kind of excesses and corruption of elected officials just because they are in our party. Our vision of a nation in which government serves, and is accountable, to the citizenry instead of corporations, is far more important than preserving a seat in Congress. In many cases, yes, including Joe Biden, we held our noses this year and voted for people we knew were ultimately not our friends. But at the same time, we also put money behind people like Donna Edwards and Darcy Burner and Scott Kleeb and Jeff Merkley and Andrew Rice -- some of whom won their races and some didn't, but the infrastructure is there to continue to recruit and fund better Democrats to replace some of these hacks. And yes, we will be right there watching Scranton Joe to make sure he doesn't slip again. He doesn't have to protect jobs in Delaware as his primary mission anymore, he has to do what's right for all of us.

There will also be plenty to write about because Sarah Palin is not going away. How much of a threat she is remains to be seen, but it speaks volumes about the intellect of American Republicans that this willfully ignorant, bigoted, greedy diva has a 91% approval rating in her party. Right now there is a steel cage match going on between the Greed wing of the Republican party, led by Grover Norquist; and the God wing, which has chosen Sarah Palin as its standard-bearer. The Greed wing could ordinarily be expected to prevail, were it not for the collapse of the Wall Street gods. Not-Joe the Not-a-Plumber Welfare King may become a laughable postscript to history, or he may move to Alaska and join Sarah's Army of God and spend the next four years in the Alaska wilderness preparing to bring their Righteous Sword o'Jesus to the masses. If Barack Obama can succeed in even making this recession a bit less deep and a bit less long, and in making people's lives as we weather this crises even a bit better, he may be able to prevail in four years. But even though this flaming bag of poo that is the American economy doesn't belong to him until January 20, there are those who have already conveniently forgotten about the 6000-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in this Year of Bush and are already calling for Obama to be impeached.

Never underestimate the ability of Americans to be manipulated by meatheads.

And that is why we will continue to write. Our job may be more difficult now, because it's much easier to rant about a president you despise and who, with his ineptitude, has made a mockery of the nation he leads, but Barack Obama doesn't get a free pass just because he's "our guy."

We will support him when he deserves our support. We will get his back when he's attacked unfairly. We will defend him when he's right, and try to set him right when he isn't. That Change.gov seems to be opening up precisely this kind of dialogue with the citizenry is a positive sign. That the organization chart of the U.S. government to which the transition team has linked clearly shows not the President or the Vice-President at the top, but the United States Constitution, is another. But hopeful signs are just that until they are backed up by hopeful action. I'm, well, hopeful that the actions following the words are exactly what we will see.

But we must never forget that no matter who is in the White House, or the Senate, or the House, they all work for US. And we must make sure they don't forget either.

UPDATE. Now THIS is the kind of thing I like to see. THIS is governing with a mandate. This is what you can do when you actually win and don't need the Supreme Court to hand the presidency to you and you don't need Ken Blackwell to make up fake terrorist threats so you can rig the vote count in your favor.

The right wing is going to scream bloody murder no matter what Obama does. That's how Sean Hannity and Oxycontin Man makes their living. But dday is right -- if Obama has set out Paul Wellstone as his model, well, that would be just dandy with me.

You see, I've already been accused of "attacking" Obama because I think it is the role of the blogosphere to "keep him honest." The worst thing we can do is become the left-wing version of Not-So-Free Republic.

In my new job, we have all kinds of performance measurement tools and goodies they use to determine whether we get things like raises. Your review is based on goals you set yourself, and the tangible, measurable things you set to help your supervisor determine how well you met those goals. I like that these are quantifiable things so that you can't get a bad review just because your boss is freaking out about a project before he takes off for three weeks of vacation. Here are the goals I have set forth for Barack Obama:

1) Make things better. Not perfect. I don't even expect him to bring us out of this recession. If he can stop the free-fall, stabilize the markets and use his influence to help the job market by pushing government investment in things like alternative energy, that's fine for a first term, given the flaming bag of poo he's been handed.

2) 1-2 decent Supreme Court justices.

That's all I ask out of the first term. Barack Obama is a smart man, and I think those goals are eminently achievable.