A man is seated on the pavement next to a group of Tea-Baggers, as the right-wing faction that wishes to prove that President Barack Obama is not only a foreigner, but a Muslim terrorist bent on turning America into a Socialist/Communist nation, heckles him. The man has Parkinson’s Disease and can’t afford health insurance. He only is silently asking for a glimmer of hope in the pending congressional vote on the President’s health care bill, not a handout. As the deplorable video shows, one man starts preaching about no handouts, and another goes so far as to sarcastically toss a couple of dollar bills at the suffering man.

                   What the FUCK is that all about? Have the working class been that tragically programmed that a simple man’s suffering becomes cause for ridicule? Do Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Anne Coulter, and Sarah Palin among others, really hold that much of a vise-like grip on public thinking? Apparently they do, and it makes this ex-pat happy to be living away from it, yet sad to see this way of thinking wielding so much power. If Barack Obama had imagined the divided nation that he’d have to be presiding over, he may have done a lot more soul-searching before taking on a job of this magnitude.

                     Fox News (“Fair and Balanced?” Like pencils lay eggs!) fosters this mania, and the above-mentioned offenders go on carping about the so-called “liberal media” when in fact most of that media is owned and controlled by hard-line conservatives who would side with Michelle Bachman long before they would Al Franken.

                         Poor Barack inherited a nation embroiled in two wars they could have easily avoided, a budget deficit partly caused by investment in said wars, and a horribly rising rate of unemployment as big corporations and banks go under, but not before giving their bosses huge payoffs. They can’t hound him for a blowjob, as they did with Bill Clinton, who sadly had to renege on a lot of promises along the way, including health care, because of having to answer for this nonsense when he could have been chasing Osama Bin Laden. With Obama, the issue seems to be total innuendo about his “true nationality,” but hey, the guy produced a birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii in 1961. Hawaii became the 50th state in 1959. It’s legal, fuck off!  

                 The latest poll showed 24% of all Republicans believing Obama is the Anti-Christ, 38% of them believing that Obama is doing what Hitler did. Now beyond ordering the killing of millions of Jews, there’s only a small percentage of Americans, and I can’t claim to be one of them, who could tell you what else Hitler did, but I think it’s safe to say Obama hasn’t ordered anyone executed . So who the hell commissioned such a horrible, biased poll to take place, and the results to be published? Oh, let’s have a guess!

                    Obama has, like Clinton, had to put certain promises and policies on the back burner for a variety of reasons, not all of them completely justifiable. But for Chrissake, what he has to deal with in a horribly divided legislature I wouldn’t wish on anyone. The fact that the health care bill passed probably saved his ass with his less ardent supporters, who might have ditched him otherwise. He’s got a rough road ahead, and the possibility of an assassination will always be there, compounded by the fact that he is indeed black, which triggers (wrong word I know) an additional set of horrendous rationalizations by a group of lemmings who only need some oblique sign, and the deed is done.

                      I do hope that in 2012, the Republicans nominate Sarah Palin as their presidential candidate, and at the same time, that Obama is indeed running for re-election and not hiding in Argentina, or worse.