Moments Worth Preserving

By Badphairy


I want to bronze this moment. My brother (the second eldest) is gloating about Hillary’s primary loss in “the whitest state in America” (Iowa). This is de rigeur in my family. However, I’m hearing “Go BarackO” in my ear. From my brother. The Marine. The lifelong Republican voter. He’s “voting for change” as I peel my jaw off the floor.

I’m not really sure how to take this. I’m not sure who I’m voting for, but I never thought I’d be discussing an election like this in my lifetime.

By the way, I am vaguely sickened by the way the media keeps portraying this as “the woman vs. the black” as if there is nothing to them but their labels. On this particular day, should we not be assessing candidates by the contents of their characters, not the color of their skin or the presence (or absence) of meat curtains?

Back to my brother, I’m just feeling weirded out by his support for Obama. It’s not as though I haven’t spent years attempting to convince the male members of my family that voting Republican didn’t necessarily float all boats equally. I got the standard WASP reply, i.e. ”I don’t actually care about other people’s boats. I care about my boat. Now STFU and scrub my floor”.

We did go on to scream at each other until we agreed that HillDawg can’t be BarackO’s Veep because it would lose him the support of cross-voting conservatives. He assured me there are some. I’d like pictures, names, and addresses, please.

I was interested primarily because I’ve rarely been able to have conversations like this in my family. Most of my family can’t or won’t “discuss.” They just scream loudest about how great the Republicans are and then retreat into pissy butthurtitude. In fact, I told one of them the housing bubble wouldn’t last and to prepare for the coming downturn, three years ago.

Not only didn’t he listen, I’m sure that now he would conveniently have no memory of said conversation. After all, what do Democrat commies understand about economics? I never thought my brother would be any different. Yet, here I am honestly inquiring what it is about BarackO that fires him up so.

I never really got an answer in that conversation. But he called me back. He said Americans are so complacent about their privileges that it sickened him. He’s seen fourteen year old girls in Asia selling themselves to his buddies to put rice on the family table, while we get all freaked out that our fourteen year olds aren’t doing enough extra credit to impress the Princeton Admissions Dept.

I may not agree with him about everything, but it’s damned hard to disagree with that. Maybe it’s time to put someone in power who understands that.

Who Let HillDawg Out?

I realize that Barack Obama is a personable man, an educated and gifted orator, and one of the few dedicated AND so-far-honest pols America has produced. Yes, we should get down and kiss the boots he pulled up himself with by their well-worn bootstraps.

But I gotta give a shout out to the HillDawg’s press secretary/speechwriters for the punchlines she was delivering during the last debate. “This pantsuit is asbestos” and the very best “They aren’t attacking me because I’m a woman, they’re attacking me because I’m ahead”. I think Bill wrote that one.

I didn’t get to see it of course, because I don’t have cable. IMHO, there’s something very wrong about restricting the electoral process to those who can afford the monthly bill from your choice of craptastic cable giants. It would be different if there were a “good” company, but all I have noticed is that perhaps one of them sucks slightly less than gravity. But I digress.

I know, I know, I’ve heard it all. She’s too corporate, she’s a liar, we don’t need a dynasty (she’s the son of which hereditary king, again?), she’s more of the same.

You know what? I remember what “the same” was when her hubby was in power. “The same” meant raising taxes to….pay our bills! What a thought! Fiscal conservatism from a Democrat, and frankly the only fiscal conservatism we’ve had for the last 16 years.

Let’s dust off Ronald Reagan’s (anybody remember him?) famous question, “Are you better off than you were ten years ago?” Did you cringe? Think HARD about that.

Rather than whining and playing the feminazi card, she got down in the mud with her pink Tonka truck and moved some dirt. Her timing was impeccable, her delivery was on the mark, and the applause, cheers and laughter were well deserved.

She is standing under the door marked DNC Leader over which is poised a tipping bucket of D-challenger mud; there are several slings hanging from the door handle. I like a good fight as well as the next person, but shouldn’t we be honing the messages that will differentiate the parties from each other? I just see the “kill her with fire” approach as being ultimately unuseful and yet another example of how internecine division tends to equal conquering by the other side.

By all means, differentiate yourselves by policy, by wonkery, by shoe color if you have to (oops, that will give women an edge, won’t it?) but differentiating yourselves by how loudly you can scream at the front-runner seems self-defeating. After all, the only reason to engage in such behavior is to BECOME the front-runner, right? If the only way you can “win” is to be a bigger asshole than the next three guys, well, you know what that will ensure us as an electorate? That we elect the person capable of the most assholery.

I don’t think that’s a direction in which we want to go any further. In fact, it’s how we got Luke Dumbwaiter and Darth Cheney.

I think it’s time for a change, don’t you?