Good Morning, America

Say, this feels pretty good! Much as I'd love to gloat and ramble on about the kick in the balls we gave the Republican Party last night, I am swamped. I will leave you with a few links and photos for now...

First, this one...


"Sit the fuck down, Ricky." And...


(Hopefully) "Right next to Ricky, Macaca."

Worth noting...


Minnesota's U.S. Congressman-elect Keith Ellison addresses a crowd gathered to celebrate his victory in Minneapolis. Ellison is the first Muslim to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

QUOTES AND LINKS:

LA Times:

... and the loser
President Bush wasn't on the ballot, but the election was a referendum on his divisiveness. Voters don't like it.

ON THIS MORNING AFTER, the Republican base seems less impregnable and the genius of Karl Rove less radiant. The president and his surrogates in recent weeks tried to emulate past successes by calling Democrats tax-raising, gay-marriage-loving, terrorist-appeasing clones of John Kerry. But their dog-eared playbook — bequeathed by Lee Atwater to "the architect" Rove — failed them. The center still matters.

So George W. Bush, the "divided we win" president, emerges as the day's biggest loser.

Greenwald:

The outcome of this election -- even with the not-yet-fully-finalized Senate victories in Virginia and Montana -- is as resounding and clear as it gets.

[...] This is a shattering and humiliating defeat for the Republican Party. The excuse that it is just run-of-the-mill, standard sixth-presidential-year impatience is pure nonsense...

[...] when a President is deeply unpopular and his party perceived to be rife with radicalism and corruption, they lose. And when that perception is particularly strong and widespread, they lose badly. That is what happened here, and there is nothing mundane about. These results are extraordinary, and every Bush follower knows it.

Shattering the myth of the Dems "conservative" victory, Greenwald counters:

Democratic candidates won -- in every part of the country and regardless of their ideology -- by committing themselves to one basic platform. They vigorously opposed what have become the defining attributes of the Republican Party and they pledged to put a stop to them: unchecked Presidential power, mindless warmongering, a refusal to accept or acknowledge realities (both in Iraq and generally), and the deep-seated, fundamental corruption fueling the Bush movement and sustaining their power.

Virtually every Democratic winner, from the most conservative to the most liberal, in the reddest and bluest states, have that in common. They all ran on a platform of putting a stop to the radicalism, deceit and corruption that drives the so-called "conservative" political movement.

[...] Democrats didn't win by pretending to be anything. Democrats won because they emphatically and unapologetically vowed to oppose what the Republican Party has become and to put an end to its deeply corrupt and destructive one-party rule -- and that is what Americans, more than anything else, wanted.

[...] The notion that this is a victory for some sort of mealy-mouthed, Bush-lite, glorified centrism is absurd on its face. Democrats won by aggressively attacking the Bush movement, not by trying to be a slightly modified and duller version of it. The accommodationist tack is what they attempted in 2002 and 2004 when they were crushed. They won in this election by making their opposition clear and assertive.

Carpetbagger:

Just as importantly, as far as I can tell, not single incumbent Democrat lost in Congress or in gubernatorial races. None. Think about that — every Republican challenger in the country lost yesterday. It's a dramatic historical rarity, if not an outright historical first. As Chris Bowers cleverly put it, "No one can ever do worse than they did this year."

With this in mind, yesterday wasn't just a defeat for Bush and the Republican Party; it was a repudiation.

And the Line of the Night? Otto Man:

11:17 pm: Fox News is so somber, they've done everything but break out the black armbands. They just called the House for the Democrats, and by their math, it came on Tom DeLay's old seat. Brit Hume looks like someone just shot his dog and then gay married the corpse.

That's all for now. Enjoy the day.

[It's worth noting that Blogger is surprisingly responsive this morning. I thought it would be a nightmare. Nice work, guys.]