"I Won (B!tch)"

Okay, so I added that last part, but I have to assume that was the spirit in which it was uttered by Mr. President Barack Obama in response to an objection voiced by Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) to the president's proposal to increase benefits for low-income workers who don't owe federal income taxes.

Who can really blame the guy after having made it through this historic week in which the first African American President was sworn in (twice!) to the highest office in all the land? I mean seriously Mr. Anglo GOPers everywhere - in the Senate and Congress, on talk radio and hunkered down in Fox News and wherever else you have found safe haven - you're either with us or with them. Either way, soon you'll be dead to us.

Time to get with the program. You can sit on the sidelines and cry yourself a river, wax nostalgic about the good ol' days when habeas corpus and other silly Geneva convention - like human rights could easily be trampled upon. Go ahead and Rush to judgment, root against the new American mainstream that voted for change and hope and idealism. Indulge in partisanship, in bitterness, cynicism, fanaticism cloaked as capitalism, the world is moving forward without you if we must. Go ahead and whine about economic theory, moan about the loss of failed hardline diplomacy, lament the decline of cronyism. Cry all you want about the new "old boy's network" but it doesn't really count if the head man is brown.

The challenges ahead are real. They are big. No enormous and will not be easily overcome. In fact, more than likely, when we get out of this recession, it will be with a new and creative design.

For now, just accept it. "We won, (b!tches)."

Gotham Chopra regularly blogs at www.intent.com