Is that all you got?

Let me say right up front that I don't know for whom I intend to vote.  Additionally, I have not missed voting in a single national or local election, including primaries, since about 1994 (before that I was too busy doing inverted keg stands and then bar-hopping....priorities people!).

Once I got interested in politics, I was hooked.  I won't bore you with all the details, but suffice it to say that up until my life became consumed with breast-feeding and up-to-the-shoulder-blades pooping (the kids, not me), I could have easily named all 535 members of Congress (that's House & Senate people), their party affiliation and the state they represent.  And frankly, the shit that has happened since January 2001 has been so depressing and blood-pressure raising that I decided to sit this one out and pray that the Idiot-in-Chief wasn't felled by another rogue pretzel (because that would mean President Haliburton)

Fast-forward to today and no matter what your political affiliation, this is an exciting time.  A black man?  A woman?  It's huge (nevermind the fact that we shouldn't be asking "Is America ready for a black/woman president?".  We should be asking "What took so damn long?").  Perhaps we are finally making progress away from the diatribes that have consumed our political scene since the Houston HateFest of 1992.  Perhaps we have finally realized that it matters not if a guy gets blow-jobs, if he is the one we want to have a beer with, if we can get a photo-op that proves he goes to church or if he likes windsurfing or shooting animals....and that intelligence is not a liability when one is running for president.

Yeah - I know.  I was foolish to think that.

What I didn't expect was the overt racism that is starting to come out in this election.  Haven't we done nothing but stress for the last 20 years how unacceptable racism is in this country?  We may not be able to change hearts & minds, but I thought that racism had been so marginalized that the idiots had to keep their slurs and comments to themselves, uttering them only in the safety of like-minded people and never uttering them in front of people that might not share their views.

And yet this morning I received about the 1,598th email from someone about Obama not being a suitable candidate for president.  Many of you have seen these circulating the internet.  Rather than me listing them, just click here to see them all contained (and refuted) in one spot.

What makes me sick about these is not that people are spreading lies about Obama.  Politicians and people lie about other politicians and people.  That has always happened and always will.

What makes me sick is that every one of these seem to be centered around the color of his skin (black church references, reminders of the African countries his family hails from, etc) or him not being the "right" brand of Christianity.  Check out the emails/claims that Snopes refutes for Hillary.  There is nowhere near the same level of sexism in those as there is racism in the Obama ones.  The ones about his religion are equally unsettling, but I can only assume that these are the same people who wouldn't want JFK as president because it would mean that the Pope would have a "hotline" in the White House (in other words, complete fucking idiots)...so I can gloss over those a bit.

But I do have to say - it's making me want to look at Obama a little more closely.  After all, if that's all they got, he can't be that bad!  Perhaps these people should read up on the rules of unintended consequences (that is, assuming that they can read)

Then again, this article also makes me think that a black president would be a horrible idea....If Morgan Freeman and Dennis Haysbert can't stop asteroids and nuclear bombs, how can we expect skinny little Obama to?