My Cat Stella Is Pretty Bummed That Romney Lost

My regular reader might remember that a few weeks back I got the devastating news that my cat Stella was voting for Romney. I, of course, was fit to be tied, and I tried and tried to talk her out of it, appealing to her rational side using charts and graphs and endless videos of Rachel Maddow breaking things down. But Stella is as stubborn as my mother and she was not swayed. So Tuesday night she was thoroughly bummed out and has been doing nothing but sleeping and gorging on corn dogs and watching daytime TV and giving herself baths and just sitting in the corner for hour upon hour ever since. She's not even reading her Us Weeklys anymore.

Lest she be quietly entering Victoria Jackson or Donald Trump territory with a hilarious Twitter explosion imminent, I sat down with her this evening to get a sense of how she was doing and if I needed to worry about her waking me in the middle of the night shouting about socialist Muslims under the bed.

"Stella, how you doing? Feeling okay?"

"Meh."

"Pretty blue, huh?"

"Voter fraud."

"Oh, God, Stella, it really doesn't exist, are you kidding me?"

"New Black Panthers."

"Stella, there was one guy in a beret and sunglasses at a polling station opening doors for old ladies." 

"Appeasement."

"Stella, I don't think you know what that means."

"Skewed polls."

"Gah, the polls weren't skewed, Stella, and it doesn't matter anymore anyway because the election itself has confirmed that the polls were pretty much right."

"Chris Christie."

"His state was underwater! He said a few nice things about Obama! What was he supposed to do?"

"Benghazi."

"Ugh, that's it, I'm cutting off your Fox News."

"Reparations."

"And no more Drudge Report, Red State, or Breitbart."

"Binders full of sadness."

Devastation: My Cat Stella is Voting for Romney

I'm just beside myself. I knew that Stella was a fiscal conservative--she's always been a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of kittycat. (Sure, she's never worked a day in her life, but neither has Ann Romney!) And yeah, she did kind of have a soft spot for Sarah Palin back in '08 because, as she put it at the time, "that woman is a grade-A c*nt." (She was impressed!) But, really, I thought Stella and I both agreed that the Republican Party had gone absolutely bonkers in the past few years and in no way did they deserve to be in the White House again.

So when Jimmy told me that Stella had told him that she was a Feline for Romney, I was aghast. I went straight to the cupboard, took out the DentaBites, shook the packet, and into the kitchen she ran, at which point I scooped her up, took her into the living room, and sat her down to give her a talking to.

"Stella, what's this I hear about you planning to vote for Romney? You do know that he's a congenital liar, right? And that he's just going to bring back Bush-era policies that will screw the middle class? And that he's going to try to get rid of Obamacare? Stella, you do also remember that your daddy is a type 1 diabetic, which, in the parlance, is a preexisting condition?"

"Socialism."

"Stella, Obama is not a socialist, Jesus."

"Kenya."

"Stella, if Mittens wins you know what he wants to do? He wants there to be a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage, which means your two daddies would be forcibly divorced and I would lose my damn health insurance."

"Birth certificate."

"Stella, let's be clear: Obama was born in Hawaii, and Paul Ryan is in the tenth grade. Tenth graders can't be vice president!"

"You didn't build that."

"Argh. Okay, Stella, listen, if Romney is elected president, daddy's probably not going to be able to buy you Fancy Feast anymore. How does that sound?"

"Secret Muslim."

"Stella, do you spend all day on Breitbart.com? I'm going to have to start putting some parental controls on the Macbook."

"Seamus."

"Girl, that poor dog is supposed to be a reason not to vote for Mittens."

"White is right."

"Stella!"

"Liberal fascism."

"You're making less sense as this conversation goes on."

"Eh, tired, bye."

"Stella don't you dare walk away. Stella! If you go under that bed I swear to God I'll..."

"Can't hear you. Purring."

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.

Get Ready to Roll Your Eyes

Oh, Jesus, New York Post, you really are the worst, aren't you? When I saw this headline today I just about choked on my own tongue. Are you kidding me?

As some of you may know, there's a new book out called The Obamas that dishes some dirt on the supposed friction between Michelle Obama and members of the administration, particularly hot rod Rahm Emmanuel. (It is extremely important and relevant to note here that this book currently sits a mere four slots above my own book about the Obamas, Tune in Tokyo, on Amazon's Kindle nonfiction top 100 list OMG.) The White House has responded to the headlines this book has generated by downplaying the drama, and part of this effort was Michelle Obama doing a sit-down interview with, for some reason, Oprah's best friend Gayle King. During this interview, our FLOTUS said this (copied directly from the Post):

“But that’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since, you know, the day Barack announced that I’m some angry, black woman.”

This is true! Remember the legend of the Michelle Obama "whitey" videotape that every right-wing reptile was dying to get their hands on? (And by the way, like I said, I copied and pasted the above quotation directly from the Post's website. Notice how they cheekily left out the comma that should go after the word announced so basically it looks like she's saying that Barack announced that Michelle is some angry black woman. Nice touch, guys.)

Anyway, so of course the media are going to cover this response of hers, and unfortunately the New York Post is classified as "the media," so of course we were bound to see something about this on the famously right-wing daily's front page this morning. And what did the bilious baboons over at the Post decide was the best headline for this story? That's right: Mad as Hell Michelle!

I bet the Post newsroom smells like a high school cafeteria.