It is seven (7) days before the election, and I am going to make Sarah Palin mad at me. And I am probably going to disappoint DNC Chairman Dean. I am going to make Sarah Palin mad (not that I really care, much) because I am going to be anti-patriotic and un-American. This will mean that I cannot, for the next seven days, at least, live in northern VA, NYC, Portland, OR, Chicago, or, from what I read yesterday, Anchorage, AK. What I will do for the next seven days will ban me from small towns in America, prohibit me from wearing a blue collar, making an honest (but meager) living or believing that any core humanitarian values are more important than having the government lower my taxes. Chairman Dean will be disappointed because for the next seven days I will not watch the news, donate money or sit with my cell phone in someone’s house to make campaign calls. I will not canvass, I will not attend a rally and I will not read any more stories on the web about anybody running for any office, anywhere.
Here are a few reasons why:
Niether presidential candidate has said anything new in many days. Every surrogate is on replay. I have heard it all, most of it more than twice. They have wasted enough of my time without accomplishing anything.
The black and white sides of every issue have been exaggerated and lied about. And everything is turning the color of mud. I am weary of slime for breakfast, smear for lunch and innuendo for dinner. Where's the beef?
America has been polarized to the point of the paralysis of reason and logic and the total suspension of credibility. Whatever is gospel one day is blasphemy the next.
I have received no less than 12 requests for additional money for the Democrats since early morning, TODAY ALONE, when I know Obama raised $150M last month and still has $100M in the bank with only seven days to go.
I am sick of hearing that Muslims are about to take over the United States and that Obama will steal everyone’s IRA accounts.
I know that huge portions of the populations of KY have been brainwashed into thinking that Obama is not a Christian by white preachers. I can’t do anything about that. And Republicans are still talking about Rev, Wright, but everyone has forgotten Rev Hagee.
I am sick of my email box being filled all day with pleas to help People for the American Way, PDA, Moveon.org and so many assorted right wing groups I cannot name, with money or petitions or letter writing campaigns.
I am tired of hearing about the empress’ new clothes. If I were a Republican donor housewife on a budget, you’d be pulling me off the ceiling.
I am tired of hearing doctors rail about McCain’s cancers and populists rail about his real estate.
I am tired of getting phony evidence of Michelle Obama’s room service bills.
I am tired of hearing about change. There isn’t any: there is only tired repetition. Let’s see you get any of this change past the Congress, boys.
I am tired of Obama being called a socialist and a communist by people who don’t even know what those terms mean. And no, Karl was not one of the Marx brothers.
I am tired of Nancy Pfotenauer’s toothy grin. Her head is full of hot air.
I am tired of Chairman Dean’s toothy grin. His head is full of laughing gas.
I am tired of late night talk show political humor. It isn’t funny, it is sad.
I am tired of hearing Joe Lieberman talk. Period.
I am tired of people who don’t understand economics lecturing me on economics. Sen. Phil is “all hat and no cattle”.
I am tired of speeches and talk show appearances by illiterate people like Lindsey Graham. They are an insult to all of us. Someone said recently that "You don't have to pass an IQ test to become a congressman". That explains alot.
I am tired of old white men making speeches and telling me what I should think, including Joe Biden.
I am sick of being called one of “My Friends”, when I am not one and don’t want to be. And Sarah's shrill cacaphony doesn't make me feel any better about it. .
I am tired of Cindy McCain’s dress-up clothes and Obama’s ugly, dark suits.
I am tired of talk about old Chicago politics and troopergate scandals.
I don’t care how long John McCain spent in Viet Nam as a prisoner 4000 years ago.
I don’t care if community organizing offends elitists.
But I do care that we are about to get George W. Bush and Dick Cheney out of office, that we might get a real Secretary of State, and someone will perhaps slow down greed on Wall Street and that we do not wind up owing everything we have to a Chinese banker.
I do care that someone may pay attention to health care, mental health care and the fact that most children are being left behind.
I do care that we need to end these two stupid wars without starting a third and I care that if voting fraud happens again in OH, PA and FL, somebody gets hung up by their ankles for it.
I do care that the privatization of government has got to stop and that we had better act quickly to save peoples homes and savings.
I do care that “trickle down” has failed and so have the conservative values that have driven it and that 760,000 jobs have vanished in America in the last 10 months.
I do care about many endangered aspects of life in America but I don’t care to listen to any more hyperbole and hype and stretched or mangled truths and untruths for the next seven days. I am tired of being lied to.
I do care that most of us have better things to do with our time for the next seven days than listen to this same old stuff, over and over.
And in the time it has taken me to write this, I have gotten seven more political messages and pleas on my computer screen.
So, by Sarah Palin’s reckoning, I am going to be un-American and un-patriotic and bow out for the next seven days. And as for you, Chairman Dean, I know this is not what you wanted to hear, but rather than be dazzled by your overwhelming optimism, I have simply become frazzled by the freneticism.
Simply put, there are no more lies to be told by either side about the other, so be quiet, already!
Is it November 5, yet?
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Foilage?
A Drive in the Country
On October 23, Barbara and I were fortunate enough to be able to take a day and half drive out into the Texas Hill Country, southwest of Austin, and northwest of San Antone. The plan was to have a nice hike through the Lost Maples Preserve area, look for turning leaves, kick a few rocks, get the cobwebs and Wall Street worries out of out heads and breathe some fresh air. On a beautiful Thursday afternoon, we fired up the GPS in the Honda and headed that general direction.
After several miles and a little over an hour or so, we found ourselves almost lost (I swear that woman whose voice is on the GPS is Republican…she lied to us more than once) somewhere around Blanco, Texas. Therefore, what ensued was classic: I wanted to follow the map and my gut, Barbara wanted to stop and ask directions. My ego was completely against the “asking directions”thing (I had fallen for that Republican voice by now and of course knew what was best), but Barbara prevailed and we stopped at a local feed/hardware store. Barbara went inside and charmed the socks off of two “very nice young men”, and we wound up turning left, anyway. I think we both agreed not to disagree about that fracas any longer and on we went.
After another 25 miles or so we had gone from “OK” about food to Barbara needing a serious protein boost and I needed something more substantial than Gatorade and cashews. And we both needed a bathroom. Right about then, we entered Boerne, a quite little hamlet in the rolling hills of Texas, where we gambled on a left turn, not only to get us to the next highway we needed, but also in the hope that we might find a place to have dinner. As matters like this develop in Texas, we found a place for dinner before we had any reassurance about the requisite highway. “Y’all come back, y’ hear?”
What we found, on Main Street (marked “Haupstrasse” on the street sign) was the Cypress Springs Café. “Fine Dining”, it said on the sign. We parked the car on Haupstrasse and went in.
A deceptively attractive and clearly underage blonde hostess let Barbara see a menu and Barbara quickly zeroed in on the rotisserie chicken and the something-crusted eggplant. We decided to stay, just as soon as we determined that we might use the restrooms (there was one of those signs on the front door about “Restrooms not open to the public”)
Dinner turned out to be quite good, despite being accompanied by our waiter/server, Chris. First of all, the hostess had apparently alerted Chris to the fact that Barbara had let it out that we were “traveling”. This, in turn, turned Chris into a one-man welcoming committee, purveyor of fine advice and grand inquisitor. If we had not ascertained this before, we were clearly foreigners, outsiders, non-local disturbances. All of this was fine, except that I must tell you that Chris was a young man who had a Texas drawl which was probably being discerned as far away as the Maryland shore, looked like he just fallen off of a John Deere tractor and was horribly, awfully and visibly uncomfortable dressed all in black: shoes, trousers and a shirt painfully buttoned right up to the neck. Just looking at him made me wince.
After asking about which part of Austin we had come from, where we going and would we like something to drink besides water, Chris actually did more an able job of making is feel welcome. (When we were safely gone, however, Barbara revealed that when Chris had asked if we had a place to stay, he might have been setting us up to be whisked off to local Bates motel, where we would be stabbed to death in the shower. Didn’t happen.) Perhaps most important of all, Chris gave us explicit directions about how to get on highway 46, west, which would eventually get us to Tarpley, though “I can’t say I’ve ever been to Tarpley, myself” (later on, we would come to discover that our young friend had no reason, really, to have ever visited Tarpley, anyway, because Tarpley is little more than a gas station with a post office, just down the road from bustling “Utopia”...and I’m not making this up). More important (but learnt too late) was that the right turn onto route 46 that we sought, was right at “the third stoplight, I think, right there at the Wendy’s”. Had we known that, we would have had chicken nuggets and fries for perhaps $7.00 instead of rotisserie chicken and eggplant for $32.00.
At this point, I should mention that all during the trips’ daylight hours, we were seeing an increasing abundance of “McCain/Palin” signs on fencepost and driveway gates, and nary an Obama sign anywhere. But when we left the Cypress Springs Café, and went to the car, to find route 46 and go on, after I unlocked the door on Barbara’s Accord, we stopped to give each other a hug, and as I looked over her shoulder, I saw it:
In the two matching display windows, in a clothing shop on the “Haupstrasse”, two doors down from the venerable Cypress Springs Café. John McCain was staring at me. A photograph of his oddly shaped (and by now familiar looking) face was gazing at me, from atop a mannequin, where it had been affixed, next to another mannequin, this one female, sporting a photo on top of Sarah Palin. A banner sprawled atop both windows proudly proclaimed:
“Behind every good man stands a good woman.”
As I urged Barbara to slowly turn and see what I had seen, I worried that she might faint from surprise, and then, simultaneously, I realized I was a stranger in a strange land and that I had left my passport and my travel papers back in Austin. We pulled away slowly, heading toward route 46, and kept checking the rear view mirror and looking over my shoulder the entire time.
Throughout the remainder of our trip, which was delightful, by the way, I could not shake the notion that, not only were those poor lost maples of Texas turning, but since someone could actually so brazenly and honestly fill two entire store windows on “Hauptsrasse” with that “good woman” beside that “good man” also turning was my stomach.
On October 23, Barbara and I were fortunate enough to be able to take a day and half drive out into the Texas Hill Country, southwest of Austin, and northwest of San Antone. The plan was to have a nice hike through the Lost Maples Preserve area, look for turning leaves, kick a few rocks, get the cobwebs and Wall Street worries out of out heads and breathe some fresh air. On a beautiful Thursday afternoon, we fired up the GPS in the Honda and headed that general direction.
After several miles and a little over an hour or so, we found ourselves almost lost (I swear that woman whose voice is on the GPS is Republican…she lied to us more than once) somewhere around Blanco, Texas. Therefore, what ensued was classic: I wanted to follow the map and my gut, Barbara wanted to stop and ask directions. My ego was completely against the “asking directions”thing (I had fallen for that Republican voice by now and of course knew what was best), but Barbara prevailed and we stopped at a local feed/hardware store. Barbara went inside and charmed the socks off of two “very nice young men”, and we wound up turning left, anyway. I think we both agreed not to disagree about that fracas any longer and on we went.
After another 25 miles or so we had gone from “OK” about food to Barbara needing a serious protein boost and I needed something more substantial than Gatorade and cashews. And we both needed a bathroom. Right about then, we entered Boerne, a quite little hamlet in the rolling hills of Texas, where we gambled on a left turn, not only to get us to the next highway we needed, but also in the hope that we might find a place to have dinner. As matters like this develop in Texas, we found a place for dinner before we had any reassurance about the requisite highway. “Y’all come back, y’ hear?”
What we found, on Main Street (marked “Haupstrasse” on the street sign) was the Cypress Springs Café. “Fine Dining”, it said on the sign. We parked the car on Haupstrasse and went in.
A deceptively attractive and clearly underage blonde hostess let Barbara see a menu and Barbara quickly zeroed in on the rotisserie chicken and the something-crusted eggplant. We decided to stay, just as soon as we determined that we might use the restrooms (there was one of those signs on the front door about “Restrooms not open to the public”)
Dinner turned out to be quite good, despite being accompanied by our waiter/server, Chris. First of all, the hostess had apparently alerted Chris to the fact that Barbara had let it out that we were “traveling”. This, in turn, turned Chris into a one-man welcoming committee, purveyor of fine advice and grand inquisitor. If we had not ascertained this before, we were clearly foreigners, outsiders, non-local disturbances. All of this was fine, except that I must tell you that Chris was a young man who had a Texas drawl which was probably being discerned as far away as the Maryland shore, looked like he just fallen off of a John Deere tractor and was horribly, awfully and visibly uncomfortable dressed all in black: shoes, trousers and a shirt painfully buttoned right up to the neck. Just looking at him made me wince.
After asking about which part of Austin we had come from, where we going and would we like something to drink besides water, Chris actually did more an able job of making is feel welcome. (When we were safely gone, however, Barbara revealed that when Chris had asked if we had a place to stay, he might have been setting us up to be whisked off to local Bates motel, where we would be stabbed to death in the shower. Didn’t happen.) Perhaps most important of all, Chris gave us explicit directions about how to get on highway 46, west, which would eventually get us to Tarpley, though “I can’t say I’ve ever been to Tarpley, myself” (later on, we would come to discover that our young friend had no reason, really, to have ever visited Tarpley, anyway, because Tarpley is little more than a gas station with a post office, just down the road from bustling “Utopia”...and I’m not making this up). More important (but learnt too late) was that the right turn onto route 46 that we sought, was right at “the third stoplight, I think, right there at the Wendy’s”. Had we known that, we would have had chicken nuggets and fries for perhaps $7.00 instead of rotisserie chicken and eggplant for $32.00.
At this point, I should mention that all during the trips’ daylight hours, we were seeing an increasing abundance of “McCain/Palin” signs on fencepost and driveway gates, and nary an Obama sign anywhere. But when we left the Cypress Springs Café, and went to the car, to find route 46 and go on, after I unlocked the door on Barbara’s Accord, we stopped to give each other a hug, and as I looked over her shoulder, I saw it:
In the two matching display windows, in a clothing shop on the “Haupstrasse”, two doors down from the venerable Cypress Springs Café. John McCain was staring at me. A photograph of his oddly shaped (and by now familiar looking) face was gazing at me, from atop a mannequin, where it had been affixed, next to another mannequin, this one female, sporting a photo on top of Sarah Palin. A banner sprawled atop both windows proudly proclaimed:
“Behind every good man stands a good woman.”
As I urged Barbara to slowly turn and see what I had seen, I worried that she might faint from surprise, and then, simultaneously, I realized I was a stranger in a strange land and that I had left my passport and my travel papers back in Austin. We pulled away slowly, heading toward route 46, and kept checking the rear view mirror and looking over my shoulder the entire time.
Throughout the remainder of our trip, which was delightful, by the way, I could not shake the notion that, not only were those poor lost maples of Texas turning, but since someone could actually so brazenly and honestly fill two entire store windows on “Hauptsrasse” with that “good woman” beside that “good man” also turning was my stomach.
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