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Eighteen Days of Hope and Change?

Was it all about power, after all—the furious Hollywood outbursts, novels, and films about killing Bush, and the Kerry-Kennedy-Reid-Pelosi-Durbin sermons on morality and ethics?

Was Obamania not about oceans receding and the planet cooling, not about vero possumus, or the Victory Column and a faux-Parthenon ushering in a sort-of-Virgilian new age?

Instead, though Bush-Hitler supposedly used to demonize his opponents as un-American, we get silence as Obama now dubs those who jump the Republican ship to vote for his trillion-dollar package as "patriotic" in the way that those who will be willing to pay Joe Biden's new higher taxes are—patriotic? And "The Decider" simply morphed into "I won"; and we went from Duke Cunningham and Larry Craig without a blink to Charles Rangel cheating on his taxes, and Dodd/Frank getting low-interest loans or a great job for a partner, as they took money from Freddie/Fannie and ensured they could implode without restraint? Was that all hope-and-change was about?

And in two weeks we went from the highest ethical standards in history to Richardson and Daschle pulling out for probable violations of the law and the new treasury secretary and de facto head of the IRS cheating on his taxes? And the secetary of labor suddenly paying off liens and lobbying for labor organizations? And ten-plus lobbyists appointed to a new no-lobbyist government? And when Hollywood used to give us movies like Rendition, and rants about Bush shredding the Constitution, what did hope-and-change give us? More FISA, the Patriotic Act, rendition, Iraq, and another year at least of Guantanamo—all now as necessary and legitimate as it once was Hitlerian. And after eight years of "Bush is trying to terrify us" we are told that anyone not voting for a new trillion dollars of debts is ushering in catastrophe, and without sudden change California will have no farms, no agriculture even. And for the incompetent, deer-in-the-headlights Scott McClellan, we got—incompetent, deer-in-the-headlights Robert Gibbs? Was that all hope-and-change was?