Ho Gaya

For those of you who are of sound mental health and less obsessive character, I assume "The Corner" means nothing. It is a proto-blog of the National Review, which is sort of the print equivalent of FOX News, if instead of being run by old, white, screechy GOP stooges, it were run by smart-ass, coddled, screechy white GOP stooges. It's not really a blog so much as a stream-of-consciousness river of bile and sludge. They post dozens or hundreds of comments each day. You don't really read it so much as have a glance to study the nature of the sludge that is passing by at any given moment.

Tonight, they are in a foul mood. Generally an extremely triumphal crowd (no event is too obscure, deeply lodged in the echo chamber, or tiny to be celebrated), tonight they were just cranky, like a child up past her bedtime. Or, say, an old fart who's getting his keister kicked by a young whippersnapper in the US presidential election. They declared no victory. Aside from the usual hysteria ('Would you have guessed that [Obama]'s pals with a guy who brags about bombing the Pentagon? Would you have guessed that he helped underwrite raging anti-Semites?"), they were dispondent and resigned to loss. They even started to turn on McCain, a kind of apostasy previously unthinkable for this particular strain of the Bush Youth:

We have a disaster here — which is what you should expect when you delegate a non-conservative to make the conservative (nay, the American) case.

At the end of autocratic regimes, this must be what it's like--the loyalists eating one another, blaming the failure on a lack of fidelity and discipline, fear and insanity in their eyes as the world tilts on its axis.

In Hindi, there's this phrase which means something like "it is finished"--ho gaya. When something is completely done, irrevocably, Indians will use this word, sometimes emphasizing it with a sweeping motion of the palm.

After tonight's debate? Ho gaya. Change, she is a'comin.