I’m confused by the Obama=Antichrist fears. I mean, if he were, wouldn’t that technically be a good thing? Doesn’t that mean that the end times are coming (or upon us) and the Big J is going to come and kick some ass and lift all the True Believers into heaven? If I were them, I’d be celebrating this development.
The Rapture is the sum of our hopes, the pinnacle of our dreams, the reward for our patience, unless of course it’s accompanied by higher taxes and big government. Just like the liberals to throw a curve like that.
All things considered that’s a very small difference.
Look at it this way; suppose you could get 50 Americans who voted into a room. If they were perfectly distributed according to the actual vote, you’d have 26 Obama voters, 23 McCain voters, and one numbskull who voted for a fringe candidate. You have to admit that’s not exactly a huge disparity.
Presidential elections ARE close. The base of the two parties makes up most of the electorate.
The word you want is ‘servile’.
Actually, the words I want are “sensibly allied for once with”. 
I am bemused. This election, while certainly not a landslide, was not close. 2004, that was close. 2000, that was closer. 2008, not so close.
What “all things” are you considering?
As Frank pointed out, a 6.5% difference doesn’t strike me as all that very small a difference as elections go. It’s not the 20% difference by which Johnson won re-election over Goldwater, but it’s certainly the largest difference by which a new presidential candidate has won since Reagan, except for George H.W. Bush, who was Reagan’s VP, and thus not really a new candidate. Both Reagan and Clinton did better in their re-elections, but I think that’s more typical: re-elections do have larger margins as a rule.
In fact, prior to Reagan, you have to go back to Eisenhower and before to start finding new candidates winning by large margins, and the political situation was extremely different prior to 1952, what with the economic and world events of the first half of the twentieth century and the influence of mass communications on elections in the second half of the twentieth century.
So for the current era, Obama won by quite a healthy margin. Not as much as Reagan, but quite comfortably. Let’s hope his policies work out better than the thirty year march to disaster that Reagan’s policies have been, culminating in the current economic crisis.
This was a dozen or so years ago. They had dozens of empty milk bottles full of water, talked about what the apocalypse would be like, had a chapel built onto their house, owned a Catholic bookstore for a while, etc.
I’ve been meaning to give her a call, actually. I’m curious to see as how she’s taking this election and how she sees it.
Who cares?
The worst mistake conservatism has made over the last several decades was getting in bed with the religious whackjobs. That decision bites us in the ass constantly.
That decision has gotten you folks into office repeatedly, so I wouldn’t be so quick to repudiate it, clothahump*. You folks didn’t hook up with the religious whack-jobs on a lark. You (the conservatives, or at least the conservative leaders) did it cold-bloodedly, with eyes open, because it bought you real benefits of a fanatical base that could be counted on to get out the vote and bring in the ignorant voters for every election, and that’s a significant portion of your share. Plus there’s a considerable overlap between the ideological conservatives and the religious whack-jobs, so which ones are you planning to dump and which are you keeping?
*I know you’ve explained your name at least once and it’s something comparatively mundane and not nearly as Pooh-ish as it sounds, but I’m always so enchanted by it that I always enjoy seeing it in a post! I can’t remember the explanation now.
Clothahump is a magic turtle wizard from the Spellsinger books.
I like saying ‘magic turtle wizard’.
The religious nuts will drop on their knees and pray. Then they will pray and pray and pray.
It will work just as well as it always does,not at all. But,they will not notice. They will convince themselves that it does or that when it doesn’t it is actually an answer. So no matter what happens ,all is gods will. He wants the religious right to lose. He wants Palin to slither back to Alaska. He makes the evangelical leaders go off buggering kids or using hookers. It is a test. No matter what happens. they did not fail.
No, I have it on good authority (my brother’s boss, who is a Christian of Sarah Palin’s approximate flavor) that Satan interferes with God’s plan fairly frequently, and specifically targets evangelical leaders by tempting them in particular to bugger kids or use hookers. He apparently deliberately sets out to destroy the good men that way. That’s why so many of them end up having scandals revealed.
So presumably, I’m guessing, Satan has also tempted the otherwise good people of America to vote for the evil Obama to further his agenda in some devilish way, probably to make them more likely to get abortions and turn homosexual, because we all know that Obama will encourage both, as well as fostering anti-American terrorism in small children. My brother hasn’t reported the gospel on Obama’s election yet; I’m not sure whether he’s heard it yet, but if he has, he hasn’t passed it on to me.
E-Sabbath, I should have remembered that, because I read Spellsinger years ago. Isn’t that where the ermine does a rather sexy, er, exotic dance in a pub inside a tree, or am I confusing it with another fantasy book? I have to reread that when I get my books unpacked (I just moved). In any case, thank you for clearing that up.
This election was just gods will.
I’m not sure if it was an ermine, but something like that happened.
I do believe you’re right. It fits Clothy. I always imagine him as a mossbacked turtle with a little hat and beard.
My point was, to some fundamentalists, evil is largely explained not as being God’s will, but as the handywork of Satan, deliberately subverting the best and most Christian among us. That’s God’s will only in the sense that he supposedly gave mankind to choose between good and evil
Having forgotten the book, I always imagined him as a pseudo-monster along the lines of a Heffalump. If you’ll recall, a Heffalump was (IIRC), Pooh with a jar of honey stuck on his head. So I pictured a Clothahump as a monster that consisted basically of a similarly ominous (that is, similar ominous to a Heffalump) shape rising up covered with cloth, i.e. blankets. A Hump of Cloth, you might say.
As a result, I’ve always maintained a certain fondness for Clothy totally unrelated to his politics, which I find to be completely in disagreement with my own. I can’t help it. He’s linked with Pooh in my mind.
The Clothahump in the book is a bipedal turtle with hands. He’s a powerful wizard with bouts of senility. And he has drawers built into his plastron ( belly ), complete with knobs, full of spell ingredients and such. A dimensional spell lets him do that without having to displace internal organs.
I suppose by “conservatives” you mean economic libertarians – but why do they have any better claim to the name than the religious whackjobs have? There are several factions, that’s all.