Lakai
November 8, 2008, 6:07am
1
I know I’m pushing the limit of board’s Obama tolerance here.
I just thought we should have thread on this considering that just about every single newspaper had at least something to say about this historic event.
Here is my favorite from Thomas L. Friedman :
And so it came to pass that on Nov. 4, 2008, shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern time, the American Civil War ended, as a black man — Barack Hussein Obama — won enough electoral votes to become president of the United States.
A civil war that, in many ways, began at Bull Run, Virginia, on July 21, 1861, ended 147 years later via a ballot box in the very same state. For nothing more symbolically illustrated the final chapter of America’s Civil War than the fact that the Commonwealth of Virginia — the state that once exalted slavery and whose secession from the Union in 1861 gave the Confederacy both strategic weight and its commanding general — voted Democratic, thus assuring that Barack Obama would become the 44th president of the United States.
The Onion (seriously).
LOS ANGELES—Lakers shooting guard Kobe Bryant had a typically solid performance from the field last night, scoring 25 points to propel his team to a holy shit, it’s hard to believe these words are even gracing this page, but on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, the American people elected a black man to the office of the President of the United States.
Words really can’t describe how…or what, or…. Wow.
Bryant, who got off to a slow start early, but managed to find his touch late in the third, incredible. A black president for a nation whose entire history has been haunted by the specter of slavery and plagued by racism since before its inception. That this happened in our lifetime is remarkable; that it happened within 50 years of a time when segregation was still considered an acceptable institution is astonishing. Absolutely astonishing. This is an achievement on par with the moon landing.
Okay, it might not be beautiful rhetoric, but I’m pretty sure it nicely sums up a lot of people’s feelings on it. Read the whole thing.
“Whoever would have thought in 2004 that even Bush could so screw up the country so badly that by the end of his term, we would elect as President some black guy begging for change?”