Thursday, January 20, 2005
BLACK THURSDAY Joshua Marshall hit the nail on the head back in November, on a sad Wednesday morning:
Setting aside my general political leanings, my personal views and feelings of partisanship, I think the result portends very bad things for America's role in the world and the well-being on all levels of this country.Welcome to the next phase.
Changes in domestic politics, in theory at least, can be shifted back at a following election. The world, though, is different. There we are just a ship--though the largest one--on waters we can never truly control. And I fear that this result will set in motion dangerous dynamics that even the relatively young among us will be wrestling with and contending with for the rest of our lives...
Before today, the course that America had charted in the world over the last three years could be seen as the result of a traumatic event (9/11) and the choice of a president who was actually put in office by a minority of the electorate. This was a referendum on what's happened in the last three years. And it's been validated.
UPDATE: On the bright side, at least the clock has started ticking.
