Some of my friends have had lOBAtaMAys

I 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>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>