Some of my friends have had lOBAtaMAys
Posted: June 18, 2008 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: fear tactics, No Obama, PUMA 6 CommentsI was sitting in my favorite neighborhood bar the other night. Nearly every one in New Orleans does that. It’s a bit like your front room but with a few more people and a better liquor selection. Two long time friends were there. One owns the bar and the other is a lawyer and we have always agreed on nearly everything. We all supported Hillary in the primary. After a few minutes, it became obvious that I was the only hold out.
I mean it was really late. I had had quite a few glasses of wine. I knew they’d been drinking all day at the festival in the quarter. I don’t even remember how the subject came up actually. But I said it. I will not vote for Obama under ANY circumstance. You’d have thought some drug had been droppped into their drinks. I was suddenly confronted by the same nasty hate filled spews I’ve been putting up with for months now out here in blog land. At first I thought I could shake them off with, yeah, right Republicans will set up housekeeping in my uterus and my grandchildren will be dying in iraq 100 years from now. If we just stick a few references to 9-11 in there enough I’d think I’d gotten shoved in a time warp of 4 years ago in a black hole of fear tactics. Except, it wasn’t just all that fear-mongering. It was hateful and mean! Instead of being called a racist, I was asked how my ‘boyfriend’ (who happens to be a black longshoreman) would feel about this. I was called anti Roe v. Wade. I was accused of being a bad buddhist since I was obviously now a war-monger. I was double-teamed until I was called out on saying iran instead of iraq once and then you’d have thought I’d been caught skinning neighborhood cats alive for all the ruckus that created.
I could only take so much of that. I mention all the gaffes and flip-flops I catalogue here. I mentioned my favorite Obama sound bite about how we can’t have a timetable for Iraq and we should look at what it takes to be successful from April 2005. (See the youtube clip on the gaffe page because his website says he supported a time table in 2005.) Of course I got back THE story about sniper fire and she VOTED for THE war! All the things that I’m more than used to by now. I can list a dozen of his things to her one and it still doesn’t sink in, once you’ve been lOBAtaMAized. I finished the wine, leashed up my poor dog Karma, who by now was even the subject of wrath and simply walked out the door. But not before I unleashed my parting shot:
“Just THINK!” I said. “You thought I’d just go along and not question anything. Well, if you were wrong about me, how many more do you think you’re wrong about, because let me tell you, there are a lot of us out there.”
And the moral to this story is there are a lot of us out there. Even if some of your friends have gotten lOBAtaMAys, you can find a lot of support on the web. You can avoid all that ‘prepare to be assimilated’ Oborg stuff. Thankfully, Karma has Blue and I have all my friends at Bitterpoliticz, the Confluence, and No Quarter and … well. Just check the blog list right there on the right>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
ecocatwoman
mablue2
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
You have a group of supporters just a few clicks away. Your parting shot was the best…there are many of us who will not back down. Your friends were wrong, and our numbers will be calculated…what a surprise that will be!
It can be lonely, but know that you are not alone. We are so many and we feel just like you do.
I’ve read some of your posts here and at bitterpoliticz and you sound like an amazing person. Were you really the first person to havve a class after Katrina at your university? Did you really run for office and endure threatening phone calls from anti-choice people telling you where your kids were?
I’m sorry those friends couldn’t just talk about it and agree to disagree.
I’m definitely a holdout . Since the last primaries, my resolve to vote against BO and the DNC is not decreasing, although generally my anger is. I don’t want to be pissed-off all the time until November! I’m just going to try to be basically in good cheer while I stand for the principles of democracy and fair process.
Thank you for this. It’s only June and already I feel as though we are fast approaching the second to last scene of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” . Taylor Marsh, after a year of asserting that no sane, principled person would support Obama, and before the body was cold, began to exhort her “Marshans” to jump from that cliff she had been warning them about.The writers at Talk Left dropped like trees in a forest fire, Vastleft, Damozel at Buck Naked Politics , Donna Darko, all divining that they “get” Hillary and the “message” she was sending us was “never mind principles or loyalty just support the democrat”. I go to my favourite blogs with trepidation for fear they have “turned” overnight. I do not place my loyalty lightly and my principles are hard fought, am I naive in believing that these things still matter? Anglachel keeps me sane and now there is you.
Phylise, I know exactly what you mean. Every morning I fear that someone else will have been Obamatized while I slept. (I do look under my bed each night to make sure there is no pod there.)
My loyalty is to my conscience, my integrity and my country. If “friends” do not understand that, then they really are not worthy of being called friends.
And the more they push and prod, the deeper my heels dig in. Not just nobama, but hellnobama!
Hi Firelight, yes I ran for the unicameral in Nebraska the first year Bill Clinton ran for office and had those experiences. I beat 7 people easily in the primary and was considered to be a easy win in the fall. I worked really hard but the right to life people did not want a prochoice in that seat and bused people in from other states to work against little ol’ me. I had this horrible whisper campaign run against me. It was traumatic. For weeks after that I would have night mares that I was Jewish and the SS was coming for me or that I was black and the KKK was burning crosses in my yard.
I also was teaching on campus in an intersession in December. They had a few functional buildings back then. Nearly everything was operating out of the eduction building and I had all of FIVE students. They had the mail room running out of the classroom across the hall! One of students was working full time, going to school full time and sleeping in his truck because he had no place to live. It was really exciting to see Bill Clinton speak so close up. I’d seen him in campaign speeches down by the river during his re-election campaign. But seeing him so up close and personal was great!