Presidential tall tales

Barack Obama is a closet Muslim who wants to hand our country over to Islamic militants. He’s also a socialist who wants to replace our free market system with a government-run economy. And he’s a fascist who wants to take away all our freedoms as well as our privately-owned firearms. He might even be the anti-Christ.

Chances are you’ve heard all of these rumors about our current president at some point. All of them (except maybe the last one) probably have some tenuous connection with reality, but they are all emotionally charged distortions of the truth. Like funhouse mirror images of a real person, they are loosely based on a person that exists in the real world, but the reflection has been stretched and skewed to create something that is either ridiculous or scary.

This is what we do to our presidents. George W. Bush and William J. Clinton didn’t fare any better during their years in office. Remember how the left painted Bush as a complete idiot who cared only for the rich and liked to start wars mainly to feed his own ego?

And Clinton? Well, it seemed that a number of people had full time jobs keeping track of all the outrageous things he supposedly got up to in his spare time. Some of those things turned out to be true of course, as we all know now that he was not exactly a faithful husband to poor Hilary. But he was also believed in some circles to have a penchant for disposing of his political enemies by faking suicides or orchestrating plane crashes or, in the case of the poor Ron Brown, combining the two methods to make sure he was extra-dead. Still unsolved is the mystery of how he was able to conceal being a mass murderer from the general public but unable to hide his trysts with a silly White House intern.

It seems that whenever someone from the “wrong” party gets elected they are invariably characterized by their opposition as dangerous nut-jobs intent on destroying everything America stands for. And be assured that the next president, whoever he or she turns out to be, will get the same treatment from his or her political enemies. Unfortunately far too many of us will eat it up if our candidate doesn’t win.

I did not vote for Barack Obama. I don’t think he has been a good president, and I hope he doesn’t get reelected. I disagree with his philosophy of government on a very basic level. He believes that government is a tool to make the country a better place and he is not afraid to wield it liberally, while I think that government is a necessary evil that has already grown too big, too invasive, and too expensive.

I do not, however, hate or fear Barack Obama. I do not dislike him as a person. From what I can tell he loves his family and is probably a pretty good guy, for a career politician. I’m not interested in reading or listening to factually-challenged tall tales about how he is the new Hitler or a pawn of the Imams in the Middle East.

And I don’t think I’m the only one that feels that way. I’d be willing to bet that the hysterical character assassinations that get endlessly circulated as chain emails don’t convince a lot of people who were on the fence about whoever is in office to change how they will vote in the future. In fact they may very well do more harm than good.

I read that stuff and think, “I do not want to be associated with people this out of touch with reality, whatever their political beliefs may be.” I don’t rely on the aluminum-foil hat brigade to inform my political beliefs, and I wish they would take me off of their mailing list.