Thursday, January 17, 2008

march of the hatchet-men

It's South Carolina time again and you know what that means....all the "values" types and "christian" groups get to enter the fray and the campaign rhetoric goes from "weird" to "what the hell is this guy talking about?". For people like myself who love irony in all its forms this used to be a very entertaining time. In fact just today I got an e-mail from a group run by Tom Delay inviting me to a breakfast dedicated to "restoring God and apple pie" or some other damned thing to America. The idea of the guy who was once referred to by a colleague as "the most corrupt son of a bitch in the history of Washington" hosting a conference about "restoring our values" really puts a smile on my face. And I get the usual nonsense about Hillary, McCain, and Obama in my in-box. (Surprisingly not much anti-Romney stuff. You'd think his mormonism would drive the conspiracy idiots crazy.) This never used to bother me until I started talking to (and hearing about) people who actually believe a lot of this shit. I guess I shouldn't be surprised since I recently heard some one say (and I hope this is a bogus statistic) that 18% of Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth. I'll deal with some of the more outragous stuff in an upcoming post, but some of the stuff I've read said falsely about today's candidates are actually true about some of the best presidents we've had. A good number of the founding fathers never would have made it through the modern meat-grinder that candidates go through.

2 comments:

Bob W said...

I could not agree more, we seem to have this idea that our candidates are suppose to be perfect. It seems that no one mentions that hey these are grown men and women who have lived many decades before they ran for President, they lived and made mistakes and did some things that make them Human. I get sick of the negative stuff, like "John McCain once said a swear word, or candidate X once told an off color joke or one!" its silly.
The idea that these people were suppose to be in plastic wrap until they decided to run for President is just silly. I mean Ben Franklin was a womanizer, Thomas Jefferson Slept with his slaves, U.S Grant was a drunk, and yet these men made great contrabutions to U.S History.
Oh and these people saying the vile stuff about McCain's war record are the lowest form of scum, this is a man who was tortured, he in my book gets a pass for those five years and is the definition of what a war hero is. Thats all I have to say about that.

Friar Tuck said...

Added you to my blogroll. Btw...with all the reading you are doing you should write up book reviews on here as well.