Obama vs. the Neo-right

On one side we have Barack Obama's speech from yesterday. If you haven't seen it yet you must. I am cynical about politicians but this speech truly does give me hope, and not the kind that fits in a sound bite:

For the wrong side of the debate I give you Mitt Romney's concession speech, or at least blogger and journalist Chris Floyd's translation of it:

If you would like to see just how sick the American elite really is – how morally depraved, how intellectually diseased, how addicted to the taste of human flesh, the scent of human blood, and the sight of human suffering – then you need go no further than the speech given by Mitt Romney to the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 7, 2008.

Now you might say that Mitt Romney is old news. After all, this was the very speech where he declared he was quitting the presidential race. He's toast, he's over, the fork has been stuck into his well-roasted hide; who cares what he says? This is of course the witless "horse-race" view that dominates political discourse in America: who's up, who's down, who's getting the column inches, who's on TV? But in reality, the American elite – or the Establishment, or the power structure, call it what you will (as long as you don't call it what it really is: the ruling class) – is like an iceberg: most of its vast bulk exists unseen, it plows on beneath the surface, unperturbed by the media storms that rage around the small bit of exposed material at the summit.

You can read the rest here and you really should. This guy is one of my favorite writers and his analysis of the subtext of Romney's speech is devastating. It really highlights the subtle bigotry of the neo-right as we have come to know them in the last 14 or so years.