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The inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of the United States of America offers the possibility of the first episode of normal politics and policy-making since... since... since...
Well, from 2001-2008 we have been ruled by cruel and incompetent wingnuts. From 1995-2001 the congress was dominated by cruel and maladjusted wingnuts. From 1993-1995 the congress was dominated by old dinosaurs who wanted to teach the hick from Arkansas a lesson. From 1989-1993 we were ruled by reasonable people who thought they had to pretend to be cruel and maladjusted wingnuts. 1981-1989 was the Age of Reagan--when we had to pray for George Shultz and Nancy Reagan's astrologer to outmaneuver the wingnuts in the White House and make good policy. Before then was another four years 1977-1981 when the barons of congress's highest priority was to teach the hick from Georgia a lesson. Before then we lived in Nixonland--in which the twin centers of American politics were the successful attempt to tell all Americans who did not like Black people that they had a home in the Republican Party, and "anticommunism"--in the form of denunciations of Helen Gahagan Douglas was a spy for Stalin (besides being married to a Jew) and denunciations of Harry S Truman for being soft in communism in settling for "containment" rather than "rollback" (and, of course, when the Hungarians in 1956 dared take the rhetoric of John Foster Dulles, Richard Nixon, and Dwight Eisenhower seriously...). Before then were the denunciations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt ("the communist in the White House..." "that cripple in the White House...").
And before then...
The inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of the United States of America offers the possibility of the first episode of normal politics and policy-making since the Radical Republicans puzzled over how to use the North's victory in the Civil War to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.
