I have lived over half a century and have participated in many elections and while I might prefer this candidate over that candidate, I have never been unreservedly for a candidate. Until Barack Obama.
I was so for this man’s desire to be The One In Charge that in May I sent him $50. The first time I ever gave a candidate my money. And I then gave him a handful of hours of my once-in-a-lifetime Life, which I spent making phone calls to people who lived in Texas, or at least, to the answering machines of people who lived in Texas, and telling these people, or at least, telling their answering machines, how I was for Barack Obama being The One In Charge.
But.
While watching America‘s 4-year menstrual cycle flow its way through another cramp-filled and bloated presidential election, I had a revelation. I was shocked—shocked!— to see that not everyone thinks the thoughts that I think, or believes the beliefs that I believe, or sees the world that I see. It was made clear to me that many people did not simply prefer that Barack Obama not be The One In Charge, but were afraid, deeply afraid, of what Barack Obama might do were he to be President. They shared their fear with anyone who would listen, especially anyone carrying a microphone and in the company of video cameras. They spoke with an undeniably heartfelt fear, and a genuinely perplexed tone of disbelief that others were not, now that they had been warned, feeling the same fear.
This made me wonder, what did these people fear Barack Obama would do if he were President?
Did they fear Barack Obama would start a war? Or two? That he would tear asunder the very fabric of hundreds of thousands of American families, sending the parents of children, and the children of parents, to kill or be killed, or have their bodies and psyches mangled, in far away lands? Did they fear Obama would suspend habeas corpus? Deny due process? Deride our time and trouble tested allies? Disregard the Geneva Conventions? Slip torture into the foregin policy of the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave? Did they lie awake at night roaming lost in the dark catacombs of their fears, imagining that a President Obama would order the building of a network of international concentration camps? That he would order people be kidnapped, black hoods put over their heads, secretly transported to these secret concentration camps, and water-boarded? Did they fear that President Obama would tap their phones and sift their emails and bully their librarians into telling him what we were reading? Did they fear that, should real calamity come to this nation, say, in the form of a globally-warmed storm that would crush an American city and cut a swathe of destruction through several states, that Barack Obama would do nothing more than to blithely fly in Air Force One above the deadly mess and shake his head? Did they fear that President Obama would appoint people to positions of power and responsibility in our government who were in fact incompetent and unqualified, but did pass the litmus test of being loyal to Obama above all others and above their own country? Did they fear that an Obama administration would denounce anyone who voiced opposition to it as unpatriotic and implicitly traitorous? Did they fear that President Obama would spread the nation’s wealth, by moving the treasure of this country not already being spent on waging wars, and certainly not being spent on building or rebuilding our cities or providing health care to our citizens, and distributing those hundreds of billions of dollars to bankers, brokers, CEOs, and big corporations? Did they fear that President Obama would make our nation bilingual, by establishing Orwellian Doublespeak as the only language of political discourse?
Please.
Give me a break.
How bizarre.
No person in their right mind would do these things.
Would they?
And let’s just say that by some strange turn of events, that some President of the United States of American did such things, would not the vaunted checks and balances, and the good common sense of our nation stop him? After all, this is a country that impeached one of its more successful Presidents for the crime of lying about a few blow jobs he got at work. So really, if Obama as President even started down this insane road, enraged voices of reason and rectitude would have rung out in chorus, “Have you no decency, sir!”
I think that our first President with disabilities, that guy in the leg braces and the wheelchair who got lots of blow jobs in and out of the office, but all in a time before lying about this was impeachable, had it right when he said, “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”
Barack Obama as President of the United States of America, the leader of the once again Free World?
Bring it on.
PS: While writing the above, I had the singular pleasure of adding the words Barack Obama to my spellcheck.
Tags: barack obama, fdr, icbwb.com, nothing to fear but fear itself
