Damn, Alan Jacobs is right. You need to read his whole post, which discusses how little changing parties really changes in the permanent government (the bureaucracy, the courts, the factions, the corporations, the defense contractors, those on the left and the right sucking at the teats of Big Mama Government), and concludes:

This “cosmic principle” has gradually created a system that amounts to — if I may borrow and twist a phrase used by James Russell Lowell to describe American attitudes towards the Constitution — “a machine that would go of itself.” It goes more powerfully now that an immense security apparatus has been appended to an already-hubristic foreign-policy agenda. Like Tim Burke, I see no forces in this country capable of offering significant resistance to the great Machine.

 

This is as good as any reason for why I feel today, with Obama heading into four more years, as I would have felt if Romney had won.