Campaign '12: Time for the Nation's Senior Citizens to Start Being Terrified of Obama Again

Well, folks, get your eye pokers ready, it's time for the OBAMA WILL EAT YOUR RELIGION AND FREEDOM ALSO right-wing listserv emails to go into overdrive. Will I have to have a daily email exchange with my mother about how the people that lied to her yesterday about Obama also for some weird reason lied to her also today? Probably. And these exchanges will likely feature me asking Mom who Saul Alinsky was and why he's so scary, I'm pretty sure of it.

It seems like it was just yesterday that I had undertaken the Sisyphean task of convincing a life-long knee-jerk Republican to think of her children and grandchildren for just one damn second and not vote for Sarah Palin to be Vice President of the United States. For a while now I've just thought about that time as a terrible nightmare. Now I know that no, it was just yesterday. Today is another day.

So now that the presidential election is gearing up, momma has hit the old Facebook and turned it up to 11 with a spastic message to the world from Planet Breitbart, one that, let's be honest, could use more exclamation points.

SIGH. Folks, I spent day after day during the campaign of '08 refuting every lie about Obama my mom would forward to me: that he was a Kenyan, a secret Muslim, a Black Liberation Theologist, a Manchurian candidate bent on bankrupting America, the best friend of Bill Ayers, a radical redistributionist, a blame-America-firster, the list goes on. I was usually able to refute whatever nonsense she forwarded to me after spending about thirty seconds on snopes.com. Did it help? Never! I always got the same response from her: "I don't know what to believe." Well, I'd say one thing you don't do is continue to trust folks who are proven liars, on the email. That's a good place to start. But, sure, go ahead and remain on all those swampy, paranoid listservs, they obviously give you something that I can't.

Anyway, after all my effort, momma still voted for Wasilla drag queen Sarah Palin to be Vice President of the United States.

But it didn't end there. After a little bit of a breather, during which mom and I had an unspoken agreement that we could not talk about Obama lest I immediately die of a brain aneurysm, mom entered the fray again with a hilarious email message, subject headline OBAMA COLLEGE ROOMMATE SPEAKS OUT, which she sent to all of her children.


zzzzzzz. What? Oh, sorry. Thought I was in the movie Groundhog Day for a minute, so I figured I'd get some sleep because WE'VE HEARD ALL THIS NONSENSE BEFORE AND JUST BECAUSE YOU REPEAT IT OVER AND OVER DOESN'T MAKE IT TRUE, GAH! (I hear Republicans respond better to all-caps.)

Here we go. Can I stomach the idea of engaging with momma in another campaign season of utter paranoid nonsense? Or do I tell her we'll have to agree to disagree on basic facts about the world? The former will give me hives and nightmares about being dipped in ranch dressing and shoveled down Rush Limbaugh's gaping throat. The latter will give me a sad. Because that means that mom will continue to believe that, for example, Obamacare is a socialist deathtrap that will destroy freedom fries, and her diabetic son will believe that it's actually quite a necessary piece of legislation because he's lost his job and signed onto his huzband's shitty/expensive health care plan (which he wouldn't have been able to do if Republicans had their druthers because gay marriage is such a threat to idiotic straight people), but what if his huzband loses his job?

But! As Shakespeare once said, "It is better to be sad than to be tortured by nightmares in which you are stuck in the gullet of a jowly racist hobgoblin."

No hope.