Sunday, November 02, 2008

Not Fair, Not Balanced: A Personal Election '08 Message From Radarsite


A personal message from Radarsite: Fox News is the only cable news channel that I can bear to watch these days. But lately I find I can only watch portions of it. I can no longer tolerate those smiley upbeat newscasters, grinning their way through their election coverage as though they were giving us updates on Dancing With The Stars. I don't want to hear the pundits talking enthusiastically about how this is the most exciting presidential election they've ever covered. I stopped listening to Bill O'Reilly long before he began describing Barack Obama as a 'good man' and a 'patriot'. I will no longer merely agree to disagree with those friends and acquaintances who think Obama would be good for America; I just don't talk to them anymore. When I see an Obama sign on someones lawn I don't just walk on by and ignore it, I feel a sense of shock and disbelief, almost as powerful as though I had just seen the word Hitler.

Of course my friends think I take it all too seriously. They have a much healthier view of it all, a much more cavalier attitude. Politics is politics, they say. It's the same old game. Not worth getting yourself all upset about it. Liberals who have responded to my emotional pleas and dire warnings have invariably characterized me as a bitter, lonely, hate-filled right-winger racist, an obsessive anti-social paranoid, clinging to a semi-mythical and long-gone past. An uptight reactionary, fearful of change, stubbornly rejecting the promise of a bright future.

This is what it means to be a patriot in an America that has moved so far left that patriotism has become just another ism, another form of fanaticism. An America where love of country is equated with a low IQ, and belief in American exceptionalism is considered the worst example of blind hubris and historical ignorance. America has moved so far left that normalcy has become marginalized. If you don't want your neighborhood kindergarten teaching the values of an alternative life style to little kids you are prejudiced and intolerant. And now they want us to acknowledge our national guilt, and to move us even further to the left, into those glorious realms of the great Socialist Utopia, into the waiting arms of those compassionate bureaucrats and amoral atheists.

Well, I'm sorry if my passion disturbs you. But dammit, this is not just another election, this is about life and death, the life or death of a great country, of a great dream; our great country and our great dream. There is no room in my heart for kind words or private concession speeches to a victorious Barack Obama. No place here for fair and balanced. I do not watch him now, and I do not listen to his speeches. He is the enemy, and if he actually wins this election I will continue this practice. I will read transcripts of his speeches and I will follow his every move. I will continue writing about him and continue making my emotional pleas and dire warnings, but I will not allow his evil presence into my home. But, you say, even Bill O'Reilly says he is a 'good man' and a 'patriot'. To which I answer, Bill O'Reilly is a pompous fool and Barack Hussein Obama is the personification of the destruction of America.

This, my friends, is how fanatical I am. Not fair, not balanced. But not bitter, and thankfully, not alone.