America elects first Muslim socialist terrorist as president

He's a Muslim, possibly an Arab. He wasn't really born in America. He pals around with terrorists. He's a socialist who wants to spread the wealth around. He's a tax and spend liberal. His pastor hates America. He's not patriotic. His wife hates America. He hates Israel. His wife hates whitey. He breaks his promises. He's a corrupt Chicago politician. He's inexperienced and wants to talk to dictators. (Psst... he's also Black.)

Yet somehow he got elected anyway. Barack Obama has had enough mud slung at him to bury most any other candidate, and yet he is still standing tall. Why? Because enough Americans stood tall with him to make the difference--including millions who might never have been expected to. Sure, one might expect that the lies and dirty tricks wouldn't work in California or New York or Massachusetts or Illinois. But they also didn't work in Pennsylvania and Ohio. They didn't work in Florida or Virginia. Nor in Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and Minnesota; and not in North Carolina or Indiana either. And even in those "red states" that did go against Obama, millions of people saw through the lies.

So this election isn't just about one of the most charismatic and perceptive politicians this country has ever seen, and perhaps doesn't even really deserve. It's about the majority of Americans finally wising up to what is going on around them. They may not always be this smart, and millions of Americans have shown that they can be amazingly gullible at times. But at the moment their eyes seem to be open, and that creates a window of opportunity for remaking this nation into what it really could be--and what, as Obama understood better than all those who tried to tear him down, it really wants to be.

Old Dreams, Present Opportunities. On the eve of Obama's victory, Ken Brociner wrote in In These Times about what it means for the 1960s generation, whose utopian dreams had almost faded out in recent decades.

The view from abroad: GAZA — From far away, this is how it looks: There is a country out there where tens of millions of white Christians, voting freely, select as their leader a black man of modest origin, the son of a Muslim. There is a place on Earth — call it America — where such a thing happens. Even where the United States is held in special contempt, like here in this benighted Palestinian coastal strip, the “glorious epic of Barack Obama,” as the leftist French editor Jean Daniel calls it, makes America — the idea as much as the actual place — stand again, perhaps only fleetingly, for limitless possibility -- Ethan Bronner, in today's New York Times.

More views from abroad. Le Monde's international roundup of TV announcements.

More video clips here:

Le Kenya fête la victoire de l'enfant du pays
LEMONDE.FR | 05.11.08

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The Bradley effect. One of the little extra pleasures of this election is that we have probably heard the last of this nonsense. As Glenn Greenwald points out in Salon, for the most part Obama outperformed the polls' predictions.

Exit right. For Bush and Cheney.

The happiest woman in America? I'm guessing Cindy McCain.

Tensions between McCain and Palin camps come to light. So says the Los Angeles Times and many other media outlets. Take it outside, folks, in here we are busy rebuilding the country.