Barack Obama Is the Calm After the Storm

October 31, 2012 RSS Feed Print

"A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall"—and you know the song, voice, and songwriter, Bob Dylan. He knew what he was talking about; and now we all do

If ever a storm symbolized wrath and fury at the state of things here below on earth, it's this one. Coincidence? I think not.

Sandy's timing was so ominously perfect, a week before the 2012 election, that she will surely be a player, one way or another. Perhaps she will shock and humble some of the Wall Street titans who collected bonuses thanks to the American people into seeing that we really are in this thing together. It's the way it is.

[See a collection of political cartoons on the 2012 campaign.]

We all need each other more than we need charter schools, which you can keep underwater, if you ask me. It's a rich man's game of shame and blame at the expense of largely female schoolteachers.

Sandy's ferocity, darkening the skyline of New York City, suggests there may be something to the science of this global warming theory after all.

The Biblical nature of Sandy's floods—submerging subway lines in New York and houses in New Jersey—might have some Republicans in Congress thinking that Noah was a terrorist of some kind. That's how bright they are, especially members from Florida, Illinois, and Missouri. Reps. Allen West, Joe Walsh and Todd Akin, why don't you get out of town, preferably by losing Tuesday?

[See a collection of political cartoons on Mitt Romney.]

Speaking of Election Day, Hurricane Sandy said it as clearly as she could. This is a time of reckoning, friends and fellow Americans. Poised on a delicate point of recovery from the trauma of two trillion-dollar wars and a Great Recession inherited from President George W. Bush, we can't turn back now. Think of the last four years as atonement, the price we paid for the brazen Bush presidency.

Dark visions of the tempest help to picture Mitt Romney's presidency, which would only build on the fatal flaws of Bush's foreign policy (if it can be called that).

And I like to think President Barack Obama resembles the calm after the storm—a clearing from the hard rain we've all lived through together. It's still our land.