I am GrumpyPants McBloggyHead. I may have reached critical mass with American political culture and so I'm gonna blog it out and become TightPants McSleepyHead instead.
Here's how it seems to work for me. The government is Republican-led. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and government coffers are exhausted in the process. A democrat takes over. Suddenly the whole world cares about the deficit. The democrat is thwarted in attempts to make legislation when the the cynical, corrupted punditry goes full barrel into the culture wars. Republicans come back. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Rinse. Repeat.
Obviously we all wish Obama's leadership had been bolder. But dude has accomplished quite a bit. And yet, of course, we all know it could be more.
And this is how it is for us in the reality-based community. We want to celebrate his accomplishments and hold his feet to the fire on his failures. But it is exhausting to talk about Obama in any reasonable terms in America these days because the Republican chatter machine has gone Completely Batshit Crazy. I mean, I expected the culture wars, but this stuff out there makes "Clinton murdered Vince Foster" look almost reasonable. Well, that's not true, but, you know what I mean!
Out there in the ether, Obama is a Kenyan nationalist. He's a Muslim. He's a Communist. He's a Nazi. And, for fuck's sake, dude isn't even particularly LIBERAL!
There are too many stupid things being taken seriously in this country. So, in the interest of alleviating my grumpypants and the sheer exhaustion of modern political discourse, I've decided to make a list of the stupid things out there. The culture wars make us all stupid (I'm actually just being polite there, the culture wars tend to make the righties much stupider than the lefties):
- It is stupid believe that your right to be Christian is in any way threatened
- Is it stupid to believe that you have to deny people the right to practice their religion in order to ensure your right to practice yours
- It is stupid to believe that the Barack Obama is Kenyan, Muslim, Communist, Socialist or a Nazi
- It is stupid to believe that the 1.4 billion Muslims are all terrorists
- Is it spectacularly stupid to believe that Congress should take a vote banning Shari'a law in America.
- It is stupid to believe that Obama is responsible for the deficit
- It is stupider when you didn't care about the deficit from 2001-2008, but think it's a REALLY BIG FUCKING DEAL now
- It is stupid to believe that the only way to protect the sanctity of your marriage is to deny the right to other people to marry
- It is stupid to believe that all (or any) of our economic woes could be alleviated if we kicked out all the undocumented workers and their US citizen children
- It is stupid to blame the problems in America on the powerless
- Racism is stupid
- Homophobia is stupid
- Sexism is stupid
Dear America, stop being stupid.
\grumpypants
