I don’t talk about sex very often, at least not in relationship to my own personal self. To do so seems indiscreet, boastful, and, because of the unpleasant puritanical hangover to which women are still subjected…well, skanky. Women who talk about sex are obviously women who are having, or interested in having, sex, ipso facto: they are sluts. This is an unfortunate mental block to which even I, a practitioner of plain old boring straight monogamy, am subject. Women reach a stage in their lives – usually in the mid-to-late-twenties – where almost all of their friends get married at once, five or so dizzying years flying by in crinoline and taffeta. But there is a phenomenon that precedes it, taking place in the mid-to-late teenage years, in which almost all of a woman’s friends lose their virginities, one after the other, like dominoes.

It is this stage of life in which I presently find myself, with few of my friends still in retention of their “virgin patents,” as Shakespeare put it in Midsummer. In an unscientific poll I conducted, every one of them, myself included, felt an intense, burning, scarlet-letter style stigma after renouncing said patent, sometimes for weeks afterwords. It was a jumpy, unfounded, uncontrollable paranoia, no matter how pleasant the circumstances of renunciation (“I look at people and wonder, do they know what I was doing last night?” is the average unquashable question). It was a feeling of precariousness, that at any moment we would somehow slip up in thought, word, or deed and give ourselves away. A brastrap stained with oily fingerprints would slip out from under a sleeve; a previously unnoticed hicky would appear in an inconvenient place; some sort of balance of chemicals we’d never heard of would change fundamentally and give us clusters of pimples that spelled out “I AM NOW SEXUALLY ACTIVE, HAVE A NICE DAY,” on our foreheads. Maybe in braille.

The upswing of this is that the feeling goes away after awhile, leaving behind it a feeling of heady confidence: I had sex one time, and no one noticed. Maybe I could get away with that on a regular basis. But it’s still a hard thing to talk about, even to other women in hushed tones in empty rooms. Which is one of the many reasons I’m thankful for Dan Savage.

Dan has written his sex advice column, Savage Love, for about as long as I’ve been alive (maybe not quite that long, but close). He is also a funny and heartbreaking writer, and fairly regular contributor to This American Life, which is where I first heard him read an essay and became enthralled. The essay wasn’t about sex, it was about his experiences as a gay dad, excerpted from his book The Commitment (a life-changing read, by the way). It was stunning for many reasons, not least because Dan’s love for his son is blinding; he’s not just a dad, he’s a great one, doing his absolute best every minute of every day to make sure that his little guy grows into a happy, well-adjusted adult. All children should have such parents, gay, straight, transgendered, whatever.

After a taste of what a friend refers to as “the Dan Savage gateway drug,” (his essays on family and culture) I was hungry for more, and discovered that Dan produces a weekly podcast version of Savage Love, in which people call in, record their questions, and, with any luck, have them answered by the master. Sometimes Dan even calls back to ask follow-up questions or berate someone for dysfunctional or destructive behavior.

His on-air manner is frank, funny, and profane. He’s completely unapologetic, and seems determined to slaughter every sacred cow there is so that we can all enjoy post-coital hamburgers together. The wit, humor, and attention to grammar (“I would hope all of my listeners know that the past-tense of “come” is “came,” not “commed,”) drew me in. The parade of problems and advice kept me there.

The result of all this listening of people talking about sex in a positive, happy light, was that I began to feel like it was something that could be talked about. My mind opened up to the worlds of other people’s ‘kinks,’ as Dan says, and began to see that, though I may not share most of them, responsibly sexually active adults all have something in common: a need to connect with another human in the most intimate and pleasurable way on earth. Almost everything between consenting adults is A OK in Dan’s book, and, inch by inch, I became more accepting and less prudish, simply because I’d heard so many different forms of sexual expression discussed in a non-judgmental forum. I have become well-informed and damn near unshockable, and I strive to be that way about everything.

So I am feeling fiercely protective of Dan this evening, having stumbled upon a brief article mentioning him and a frustratingly ignorant comment attached to said article. The article is posted on a well-put together sex-ed site, which, coincidentally, I highly recommend for those of you who are or have teenagers. While I was clicking around the site, just to see what was up – I haven’t visited in a few years – I noticed Dan’s name and, of course, had to read the whole article.

The author had seen Dan speak on a college campus, and seemed on the whole pretty uncomfortable with Dan’s frankness in the same way I was when I first began listening to him talk about people, you know, doing it, right there on my iPod. He writes:

While I think that, over all, Dan Savage gives awesome advice and that it’s great to have someone like him be in the position that he is in, I do sometimes cringe at some of the advice that he gives. And so, because I did end up leaving the room feeling giddy and empowered, I want to get the negative bit out of the way first and end this blog on a positive note. To the question “Is it weird to still be a virgin in your 20s?” Dan answered with yes. He then qualified his response by stating that most people become sexually active at 15 or 16, but from there proceeded to talk about how waiting longer to have sex may make someone more prone to sexual dysfunction.His advice was “Get out there, get drunk, and get it.” He added “You don’t want to get really shitfaced and accidentally rape someone, or get really shitfaced and be accidentally raped, but anyone who says that there can be no consent when alcohol is involved is lying.”

It was this section with which the commenter took issue.

“Accidentally raped?”

As if we could somehow get ourselves raped on purpose?!? Um, okay. “I meant to get mugged last night,” or “No, it’s okay, we got robbed on purpose.”

It’s at times like this when I’m glad I don’t give people my opinion for money, because I think I would be perpetually angry at people who just don’t listen. In context, Dan’s point is clearly that alcohol is not the root of all sin that Susan B. Anthony and MADD would have you believe; in fact, in responsible quantities, it is a social lubricant. In fact, he is specifically telling his audience to drink only in moderation, for the safety of themselves and others, and he is making a very important point about rape: a woman who goes into a situation looking for sex (“a hookup,” as the kids say) can still be raped. She still posesses agency, and can put the brakes on at any time she pleases, she was not “asking for it.” He’s really advocating personal responsibility, here, telling people to stay in control of their fates, not to surrender that agency.

So I am upset at this unfair maligning of Dan, without whom I would never have heard of “grammar fetishists” (“My girlfriend likes me to use bad grammar in bed so she can punish me,” the caller explained. “I am amazed you are not a grammar fetishist,” Calvin said later when I told him about it).

And, really, I’m upset at the maligning of the term “rape” in general – it’s come up this week more than one might think.

My mom sent me this absolutely appalling article, “The Wilding of Sarah Palin,” written by a self-professed “recovering liberal.” The rape undertones are right there in the title, if she’s refering to what I think she is, and the references only get more overt.

I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow, as it would doubtless only make us both angry. The gist is that this woman was paranoid about being raped in college, so she became a women’s rights activist within the democratic party. She posits that democrats purposely keep women afraid of rape so that they’ll vote democrat, like a sick stick to the carrot of equal pay and abortion rights. She goes on to insinuate that democrats put out some sort of subliminal messages about conservative men all being rapists. She makes this allegation with no evidence whatsoever, and, if the average conservative sex scandal is any indication, my 14-year-old brother has a lot more to fear from Mark Foley, Larry Craig, and Ted Haggarty than I do.

She goes on to hint that she might have been raped (“probably at a peace rally,” Calvin groaned), and called the perpetrators “minority,” “thug,” “hoodlums,” blaming liberal social programs for the circumstances that led directly to her violation. If I may interrupt: I have a hunch that not stoning rape victims was once considered a “liberal social program.”

She goes on to accuse everyone at Berkley of being a “sleazebag,” (really, everyone) and that because liberals subscribe to the concept of moral relativism, they sanction the stoning of women in the Middle East. Where, the last time I checked, women were being preyed upon by religiously and politically conservative men.

Then it gets really good (or bad, I guess, would be a better word for it):

My other epiphanies: those ponytailed guys were marching for abortion rights not because they cherished women’s reproductive freedom, but to keep women available for free and easy sex.And the eagerness for women to make good money? If women work hard, leftist men don’t have to.
Then along came Sarah, and the attacks became particularly heinous. And I realized something even more chilling about the Left. Leftists not only sacrifice and disrespect women, but it’s far worse: many are perpetuators. The Left’s behavior towards Palin is not politics as usual. By their laser-focus on her body and her sexuality, leftists are defiling her. They are wilding her. And they do this with the full knowledge and complicity of the White House.

That’s right. Suggest that Sarah Palin is not fit to be the president, make a reference to her looking like a trailer-trash-beauty-queen-Barbie, or even question why a supposed symbol for conservative women’s independence and awesomeness required Wasilla rape victims to pay for their own rape kits out of pocket, and you are symbolically raping her.

The extreme Left still consider themselves warriors, righteous soldiers for their Marxist cause. With Palin, they use sexual violence as part of their military arsenal.

WHAT sexual violence? Has anyone raped Sarah Palin? Ever? Has anyone ever gathered a large group of impressionable people and suggested to them that they should try and make it happen, in the way that some conservative preachers are instructing their flocks to ruminate on our current president and the Psalm that says “Let his days be few; and let another take his office, let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow”?

Anyway, the woman goes on to say that all liberals hate Sarah Palin because she represents the sacred mother Mary or some damn thing, and that liberals are “life-despoilers,” as though we all sit around in dark basements plotting the destruction of the world order, with our faces all gross and melty like those Indiana Jones Nazis. Also, liberals have to take time out of this busy schedule to rape conservative women and then personally strangle any resulting offspring. There’s a quota, you know, something like five a month or they won’t let you vote in the primaries anymore.

“Life despoilers.” It would kind of be a sweet name for a rock band.

I had a point, somewhere, like, maybe 1000 words ago? Have you guys seen it?

Oh, yes.

Maybe if we were all a little more like Dan Savage – a little more open, a little more irreverent, a little more positive about a natural, biologally imperative act we’ve engaged in since our own inception – then the word “rape” wouldn’t get thrown around so much. Not only would people not get huffy at its very mention in a sex column, trying to find fault and hurl accusations of “anti-woman” and the like; people would stop suggesting that to question a woman in the public eye is to “symbolically” rape her.

Jon Stewart once said (and I never get tire of quoting it) “You know who was like Hitler? HITLER.”

You know what’s like rape? RAPE.

Let’s not trivialize it, and let’s not make it into a boogyman to the degree where it can’t even be discussed. Maybe we could just talk about rape like a normal societal ill, like poverty or murder, and not like something so loaded that to even mention it is to draw a sharp political line in the sand.

And maybe we could talk about sex like it was eating, or breathing, or dying, or anything else we all do, an unshameful everyday occurrence.

Actually, it wasn’t Adams who said that, it was me, just now, quoting an excerpt from my upcoming three-volume memoir, “Why the Girl Who Sits in Front of Me Deserves to be Executed via Guillotine, and Other Things I Learned at a Four-Year State University.”

I started here on Monday, in the six-week summer session, and it’s been pretty nice so far – Gothic brick architecture, reasonable food court offerings, interesting professors, blah blah blah.

Two things have happened quicker than I anticipated, however: my growing acclimation to campus geography, and my growing hatred of the girl who sits in front of me in my lit class.

Now, full disclosure: I am an English major, dyed in the wool. I’m probably getting my Master’s in Library Science, but even if I don’t it doesn’t matter, because I was actually born a librarian. I just can’t help it. And after lo my many years in community college, the trenches of English education, I’m pretty ready for students who want to be in English classes. I’ve studied beside and tutored students who don’t, and it ain’t no garden of daisies.

So this girl who sits in front of me – this puffy, jiggly, collagened, pea-brained harpy – is obviously of the latter category. On Wednesday in class, in an event that I will recount with bile to my grandchildren, the young man sitting to her left leaned over and asked her opinion of the day’s readings, which are supposed to be read the night before class so that they can be discussed.

“Oh,” she said, with a laugh which I’m sure she thought was bell-like and charming, “I didn’t read them.”

“Do you want to look at them real fast?” he asked, offering her the textbook.

“Oh, no, thank you,” she said politely, again with the laugh, “this isn’t my major.”

What. The. Frak.

So that means – what? That you don’t have to TRY in classes that don’t pertain specifically to your program of study? What the hell are you, a sports management major? Not all classes are inherently interesting, say, Financial Management of Libraries (yeah, looking forward to that one). But sometimes you have to take them, and the mere fact that you find them uninteresting does not make it OK to not do your homework.

What is up with this attitude? Why are you in a 3300 level class that you don’t even care about?

Come to think about it, why are you even in college?

All this geekiness I claim on my own terms, but since Calvin and I started going out almost three years ago, he’s introduced me to even more geekiness. He’s a Marvel man, so I can add Spiderman and the X-Men to my repertoire. He’s a serious gamer (and when I say gamer, I mean FF10 gamer, not MaddenWhaterver gamer), so even though I have the dexterity only for Lego Indiana Jones, I’m aware of that universe. Calvin also plays Magic and Warhammer (he paints all his own models exquisitely.)  He and I also read Watchmen together, way before the movie came out, and then we went to see the movie together, and when the four-hour extended cut DVD comes out, we will watch it again.

But the biggest and most important thing Calvin has introduced me to is Star Trek. All of it. I have seen at least ten episodes of every series, more of most, and movies 2-4 and 6-10.

And I am so excited about the new movie. Calvin and I are going to see it tomorrow, and I wanted to do something to mark the occasion. Poll time!

View This Poll View This Poll

To which I responded:

“Wait, this has happened already. What the hell?”

My mom: “No it hasn’t.”

Me (increasingly insistent): “Yes, it has. In 1999. Butterfly Tattoo Barbie.”

My mom: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Me: “I have one. You got it for me. I took it to the beach for my ninth birthday.”

My mom: “I’m sure I wouldn’t have gotten you that.”

Me: “Yes you did. You clipped an article out of the paper for me about the controversy after you bought the doll and told me to save it because the doll would be valuable someday.”

My mom: ” Nah.”

As evidence, I procured my Butterfly Art Barbie (I have since learned that this is the official name) from the naked

Jess the Butterfly Art Barbie, who turns 11 this year

shoebox orgy in my closet where she currently resides with her other Mattel brethren and politely thrust her and her butterfly belly tat in my mother’s face.

“Are you sure it wasn’t a gift?”

“Yes. I really really wanted one. Everybody did.”

My parents bought me the Butterfly Art Barbie, which, may I point out, was sold with temporary tattoos, so that you can “have fun decorating Barbie and you with cool washable decorations!” We snapped one up right after they were released in 1998, before a panicky Mattel pulled them off shelves faster than you can say “lead-lined toys from China.”

Oh, how short the memory of the 24-hour news channels!

I named the Barbie Jess (I named all my Barbies – if I’d called them all Barbie it would have been too confusing for them) and took her with me to the beach on my ninth birthday. I wanted to emulate her, sure. I thought she was great, with her plastic feet and alluring beach-hobo lifestyle. And yet I am devoid of tattoos? How is this possible?

The truth of the matter is that Jess the Butterfly Art Barbie did not make me want a tattoo, she made me desperately want crinkly hair, a style which is

a) hard for my hair to achieve, and

b) looks awful on me.

But I kept trying for years.

Anyway, people need to calm down. If your child is looking to Barbie as her primary role model, maybe you should let

Observe Butterfly Art Barbie's huge honkin' butterfly tattoo

her read, or watch television, or leave the house. In a world in which Michelle Obama is the First Lady, Sandra Day O’Connor is appearing on talk shows, and Tina Fey exists, are girls today hard up for flesh-and-blood role models? Oh, and how about you? The kid’s mom?

Also, why are we suddenly more concerned about young girls in this country getting tattoos than about young girls in this country becoming anorexic? I think we need to worry a little more about Barbie’s impact on body image than Barbie’s impact on images on the body.

I woke up to the sound of a vibrating cell phone.

Since it only vibrated once, it was almost undoubtedly Calvin texting me. I figured this morning’s text would be something about the day-to-day operation of the Venn diagram that is our lives, pertaining to our plant or trip to the beach, but it was the other kind of Calvin text: the Kind that Keeps Me Angry/Amused About the World Around Me.

He’s a very good news source, and he knows exactly which stories will make me scream/laugh. Today was a screaming day.

A 19 yr old Australian is facing 14 years in prison for “organizing her own miscarriage,” the text read. [Abortion is] legal there, just illegal to seek.

That makes no sense, I texted back.

Correct, he agreed.

So if someone jumps out of an alleyway and gives you one against your will, it’s OK, but if you make an appointment, it’s not?

Sort of. The law is 100 years old and doesn’t even make complete sense by today’s legal standards. “Seek your own” is the key phrase, but it isn’t defined.

According to Wikipedia, the law in Australia is pretty similar to the state ours was in pre-Roe – cases turn on a state-by-state basis. Abortion is the law of the land, there, in the sense that an abortion performed based upon the health risks of the mother is always legal, but each state has the right to define what that means.

Therefore, the young woman in question, who facilitated her abortion with the much vilified “abortion pill,” is in violation of the law because she based her decision to abort not on health concerns, but on the fact that she’s nineteen years old, for god’s sake. The pill, misoprostol, is essentially banned in Australia, and was smuggled in from the Ukraine.

Luckily, much of Australia seems to be with her, although most of the news stories I can find make the old mistake of saying “pro-abortion activists” are rallying. This is a label that rubs more and more on me these days, creating an emotional and political blister the size of Kansas. No one is “pro-abortion.” No one likes the idea of it. Nobody has one with relish. What I am – and what most people in the pro-choice movement are – is a person who wants control over my own life.

This story hits home with me for several reasons, not least because this girl is my age. If I were to require an abortion at this point in my life and someone were to get in my way? Oh, there would be carnage, and damn the consequences. Conservatives try to obfuscate the issue by whining about life. What about my life? I am a fully developed person, a citizen of these United States, and I have certain unalienable rights to this vessel which is my own personal body. Sure, a fetus has the potential to become a life. I am a life already.

There were several moments in Barack Obama’s campaign that made me want to vote for him twice. One of those moments was during the Saddleback forum, hosted by the Devil. The Devil asked Obama about abortion (although he did not challenge him to a fiddlin’ contest, which is a shame), and Obama responded thus:

“I believe in Roe v. Wade, and I come to that conclusion not because I’m pro-abortion, but because, ultimately, I don’t think women make these decisions casually. I think they — they wrestle with these things in profound ways, in consultation with their pastors or their spouses or their doctors or their family members.”

Thank god that we are not in Australia, and that this man is our president. But does anyone remember that, for a while there, we were alarmingly close to this?:

Sarah Palin and her child named after a tree or something

Q: Your stand on abortion?

A: I’m pro-life. I’ll do all I can to see every baby is created with a future and potential. The legislature should do all it can to protect human life.

Source: Q&A with Newsmax.com’s Mike Coppock Aug 29, 2008

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such a nuance gap between two candidates.

I think it comes down to this: the pro-choice concept is difficult for some people to latch on to because it involves the complex task of making your own decision with no guidance from anyone else.

Think about it. Atheists make religious fundamentalists uncomfortable because we manage to operate by a moral code which we ourselves developed, free of biblical intervention. Religious fundamentalists are people who cling to the chains that bind them, who genuinely don’t know how to operate without a set of rules handed down from on high. Why wouldn’t these people want abortion legislation?

I think women who are anti-choice are that way because they are as horrified by abortion as, well, anyone. And they are even more horrified by this thought:  what kind of monster am I if I decide to have an abortion? If abortion is illegal, well, congrats, you don’t have to struggle with your better angels at all. Decision has been made for you, and you have an excuse not to think about unpleasant things.

I am an inverse fundamentalist christian. I want everyone to step into the light, to see the beautiful future they can have if only they believe in it. But that future is not accessible through hate and fear. It is accessible through freedom, it is visible in the first steps taken away from dogma and puppet-strings, toward the terrifying brilliance of a world you can create yourself.

The greatest satirists of our age

I haven’t blogged in a long time.

The Rick Steves thing doesn’t count, I phoned that in. But it’s just been that this last semester there hasn’t been that much to write about. Obama won the election; Sarah Palin was returned to the padded cell that is Alaska; John McCain seems to have rid himself of the Venom Symbiote; Scott McClellan revealed once and for all that Fox News was not only a Bush shill but a Bush mouthpiece, and there was Peace and Harmony Throughout the Land. Mostly. Enough.

There wasn’t much to be enraged about, really. The few rabid conservatives still showing their pasty faces were like amusing court jesters, or Vegas contortionists – a little disturbing, a little macabre, but ultimately hilarious. I mean, have you seen those people on Morning Joe? They’re a freaking laugh riot! There’s that blonde one whose father is an economist, but she doesn’t know anything about anything; and Pat Buchanan comes on sometimes to kill hippies live-on-air, and OMG, that stupid jerky one who pretends he used to be a Congressman? Joe? He’s better than Stephen Colbert.

But my ire has slowly but surely begun to rise. It all began with this Rhodes Scholar, right here:

Michelle Bachmann, fucking insane

Does anyone else remember that episode of How I Met Your Mother where the subplot was all about not dating girls with “crazy eyes?” That’s what Michelle Bachmann makes me think of. Crazy. Eyes. Like she wants to seduce me in an elevator and then kill my rabbit. Just sayin’.

She’s been on my radar since her fittingly disastrous Hardball appearance, when she basically suggested that we reinstate the McCarthy hearings. Every time I hear her name, it’s because she said something yet more awful. In an era of increasing globalization, ennui, and mediocrity, this woman outdoes herself every single time. A week or two ago she suggested that AmeriCore was going to turn into a “mandatory re-education camp.”

Check out this highlights reel. Nuckin’ futs.

Anyway, not too long ago, Bachmann made the following statement, which, as Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making up:

“The Founding Fathers fought against taxation without representation.

Today we have taxation with representation.

I wonder what they’d think of that!”

(crowd goes wild)

Much as I hate to burst her crazy little bubble, I gotta say: I think the Founding Fathers would be pretty goddamn psyched about taxation with representation, considering that the right to it was what spurred them to revolution.

I don't even know what this means

But the Republican base, as usual, is much more interested in style than substance.

“Tea Parties” have “spontaneously” “sprung up” “all over the country.”

Translation: “Uninformed protests” have been “organized and publicized by Fox News” “in cities in which they could scrape up a couple hundred, or in some cases, a couple dozen, people.”

The gimmick here is painful to grammarians and historians alike. TEA is supposedly an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already” (by whom? The guy who spiked taxes on the middle class is gone, the last time I checked), and is supposed to serve as a schlocky tie-in to the Boston Tea Party of 1773, an event so shrouded in American glory and self-serving mythology that apparently not one conservative involved in these protests remembers what prompted the Boston Tea Party in the first place or what happened once it was afoot.

The American Colonists were protesting a very specific act, which they saw as the embodiment of every unfair law Britain had ever imposed upon them. The act was known as “The Tea Act,” therefore their boarding of a tradeship by night and dumping all the tea into Boston Harbor made perfect logical sense. Fancy that!

Educated men with a genuine legal grievance

Also, may I point out, the colonists had no real problem paying taxes. They just argued, completely reasonably, that since they had not voted for a representative in Parliament – since they had had no opportunity to cast a vote in a free an open election for a legal representative to lobby for their interests as citizens of the crown – that any laws restricting their rights as citizens were inherently unjust.

These new protesters, though, have nothing discernible  to complain about. At first, it seems like they’re upset that their taxes are too high, and then you remember that President Obama has not only not raised taxes on the middle class, he has lowered them. Then you think that the protesters are angry that they have no representatives in congress – except, wait a minute, I think I might be onto something, THEY TOTALLY HAVE MULTIPLE CONGRESSPEOPLE AND SENATORS IN CONGRESS RIGHT THIS SECOND WHO ARE ULTIMATELY ACCOUNTABLE TO THE WILL OF THESE VERY PEOPLE, crazy though these people are.

It’s a common “elitist liberal” jab that many in the conservative base are uneducated, but seriously, some of these people sound like they dropped out of school before the lecture on civics in the sixth grade.

These people, as Jon Stewart so eloquently put it, seem “to have confused ‘tyranny’ with ‘losing.’”

While watching the Fox coverage of the protests (which was a mistake) I heard several gentlemen (I use the term loosely) posit that they did not, in fact, have any elected representatives, because the person they’d voted for had lost.

What?

Really, what?

I had no idea there were people out there who were this ignorant, although I suppose it explains the continued popularity of Hannity, Limbaugh, et al. These people genuinely don’t get how democracy works. Yes, the guy you voted for lost, but you’re missing the point here: you voted. You went into a little booth and you cast a ballot and you made your stupid, twangy voice heard, and it echoed over the purple mountains and skimmed along the fruited plain. It counted for something, which is all the Founding Fathers wanted for you, yes you, you dumb hillbillies who never learned to spell the word “already” (I’m looking at you, guy obviously in his mid-twenties and holding a sign that says “Im only 15 and I alredy owe $36,000 in TAXES”), because they fought and risked treason and finagled so that you, the people, could have the rights they were denied.

People just don’t think anymore. If they thought ever. Check out this woman, who I’ve written about before. She’s the kind of American who made me want to tell foreigners I was Canadian during the Bush administration, and she’s the kind of homeschooling mom who (still) makes me want to tell people I was public-schooled. I think she thinks it’s unfair that I mention her as often as I do, but that’s no way to look at it. Shouldn’t the criticism of an elitist intellectual pinko atheist draft-dodging book-reader like myself give her lots of street cred in the Ron Paul supporter bunker-living community? And after all, isn’t horrified fascination the sincerest form of flattery?

And now we reach the true poetic irony of this whole situation: Ignorant conservative pundits failed to research the recreational sexual practices of humans before they went on Fox to talk about their little protests, and – I cannot stress this enough – by their own hand ensured that the practice would come to be known as “teabagging.”

If you aren’t familiar with the slang verb “to teabag,” I urge you, DO NOT GOOGLE IT. Just don’t. If you really want to know, look it up in the urban dictionary. Your level of disgust should be directly proportionate to how old you are and how many children you have.

If you know what it is, or have looked it up and recovered from the cooties, may I now present the long-awaited irony:

The people the conservatives are really teabagging

The term “teabagging” could not possibly be more appropriate. These people seem to think that they are honoring the sacrifices of the Founding Fathers when they are, in fact, teabagging them. Really.

Do these people have any idea that John Adams hated mobs? Hated them? Even when the mob was protesting something relevant, he preached level heads and the use of words and the law. Do these people know that he represented the British soldiers in court after the Boston Massacre, so sure was he that they had fired into the crowd in response to significant provocation from the drunken, out-of-control mob?

Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Payne – these guys you teabaggers keep citing as American heroes who hated taxes were men of breeding and education. They were revolutionaries, yes, but they changed the world not through yelling and hatred and fear-mongering but through words. They changed the world by creating things, not destroying things.

They created this country in which you have the right to have stupid, irrelevant protests about things that aren’t even actually happening. Having these little “tea parties,” as you conservatives call them, is absolutely your right, because the Founding Fathers broke new ground, wrote new law, and made a new country for you so you could be the biggest, loudest idiots you want.

Just remember: every time you drag them into your vortex of stupid, as you are now, you’re teabagging them, right in the face.

]]> http://misedjj.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/teabagging-john-adams-or-a-brief-list-of-things-about-which-i-have-recently-become-enraged/feed/ 12 penguindust The greatest satirists of our age Michelle Bachmann, fucking insane I dont even know what this means Educated men with genuine legal grievance The people the conservatives are really teabagging http://misedjj.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/i-watched-pbs-alot-as-a-kid/ http://misedjj.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/i-watched-pbs-alot-as-a-kid/#comments Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:58:10 +0000 Meredith http://misedjj.wordpress.com/?p=212 ]]> Hello, it is I, Rick Steves, your next best thing to a plane ticket. Actually, I’m even better, because your plane ticket cannot speak to you in a comforting midwestern  accent, nor can it wear huge 80s aviator glasses and plaid shirts.

Welcome! To Best of Travels in Europe: FRANCE. Please indulge in this montage of French monuments set to 80s pop.

Well, hello, again, it is still me, Rick Steves. Do not fear, I am not the sort of man who would abandon you in a foreign country, and certainly not on a subway.

I am in a CAFE, a sort of French resturant where one can order caff-ay ole-ay and bag-ettes. It is often a fun activity to sit in a cafe and be stared at by disgruntled French people.

Oh! I did not mean to confuse you with all those French words all at once. Perhaps I had better explain. I will be using lots of French phrases in this videocassette. But since you are probably too unintelligent to speak French, I will pronounce the words incorrectly in both French AND English, utilizing a special vernacular of my own devising, known only as “Frangalis.”

This sullen, excessively bearded man is my companion, Francois. He will accompany me in restaurant scenes throughout the videocassette. Francois does not respond to any of my questions in French, English, or Frangalis, so I can only assume that he is a feral man-bear.

Another thing that can be a fun activity is riding LE METRO. It is the most advanced subway system in the world – you feed your tickets through a machine that can COUNT them! Fancy that!

Sometimes, as a way to earn money, starving children will dance or sing or play instruments or rap or rob people on LE METRO. If you bring a camera crew along, the other passengers will clap and pretend to tip them. And that’s the magic and hospitality of the French people.

But we certainly can’t spend the whole day underground! We’d miss one of my other favorite activities – standing on rooftops and scanning the skyline for attractions I will never actually visit.

Look, there’s NOTRE DAME! We will not visit NOTRE DAME, for it is overrated and often crowded. And when YOU are an experienced international traveler such as I, Rick Steves, you, too, will come to consider everything overrated and abhor virtually all human contact.

I think instead we should go to Napoleon’s tomb and attempt to look somber.

Well, that was fun! But we are off to even more exciting locales. Here we are in France’s largest department store. It is so large that there is a restaurant in it, and one of my favorite things to do here in FRANCE is sit in the department store restaurant and knock back a few cold ones.

Something I like to do when I come to FRANCE is rent an apartment and buy groceries and do my own laundry and interact will REAL French people. I LOVE Parisians! They are so jolly – sometimes they will pretend that they do not speak English until more than halfway through a conversation! Then they laugh gaily, for this is a delightful game in FRANCE.

Did you know that I, Rick Steves, support marjuana legalization? I’ll bet that you did not! I bet you now think that I smoke the stuff myself. Well, you would be WRONG.

Pinza and Martin in “South Pacific”

I’m sitting here listening to the Original Cast Recording (OCR) of South Pacific, and though my mind is occupied with its usual questions (why is “You Have To Be Carefully Taught” so senselessly jaunty?) I can’t concentrate on them, really, because I’m listening to Ezio Pinza belt out “This Nearly Was Mine“.

Oh, dear god. That I’d forgotten that voice…It’s like a hot bubble bath and a velvet pillow and being kissed on the ear, all at once.

I’m reminded of my minor middle-school obsession with “Seven Brides For Seven Brothers,” which was on the classic movie channel what seemed like every other day. It was really a stupid movie, on many levels, not least because of the rampant and pervasive sexism. I remember my mom begging me to change the channel when she heard the opening notes of “Bless Your Beautiful Hide.”

Her argument was:
It was heinous that
a) Howard Keel was roaming the streets looking for a wife simply because she would be a useful farming asset, and,
b) He had reduced the act to such a transactional level that he was equating this theoretical woman with livestock.

My argument was as follows:
Shut up, Howard Keel is singing.

Howard Keel. Fine lookin' man.

It didn’t matter what. In that movie he sang about raping, pillaging, kidnapping, about how annoying his wife was, and I don’t know what else. But I hung on his every word as he wove a magical web of beautiful misogyny, and I wanted nothing more than to fall into it and iron his shirts forever, as long as he would keep singing. I also caught the beginning of “Show Boat” on the classic movie channel a month or two ago, and fell under Howard’s spell as he sang “Make Believe.” Only there was this ninny of a soprano who insisted on turning it into a duet. All I wanted to hear was my Howard, and she had to be all, “Listen to how high and shrieky I am! You could totally sing this part better than me, but I’m here with Howard and you’re not, let me continue to drown him out, LALALALALALALA……”

I don’t understand why Broadway is fixated on tenors – they have been for quite awhile now. Baritones in modern musicals have been mostly regulated to villainy (see The Scarlet Pimpernel; Les Miserables; The Color Purple; Jesus Christ Superstar; Little Shop of Horrors; Seussical! The Musical; 1776; and Sweet Smell of Success, just to name a few). But after listening to Howard and Ezio for awhile, those leading tenors start to sound pretty whiny and boring.

Colm Wlikinson: not sexy

Tenors in musical theatre were traditionally allotted “supporting actor” roles – young men who were written to be passionate, rash, and headstrong, they always fell head-over heels in love during the course of the show, and it usually ended badly.

Let’s look at The King and I, another Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. In the movie, Yul Brynner, an actor of extreme command and gravitas, plays the eponymous king. The king is a man of great pride, hard-won intelligence, and, not surprisingly, overblown confidence. His word is law, and he possesses an incredible magnetism, one that draws the educated, sensible, very British Miss Anna to him in a way she can neither explain nor define.

And then there is the tenor role, a young man who foolishly falls in love with Yul Brynner’s next wife. This tenor has only one duet to his name, and it’s nice, and everything, but Yul Brynner has all these crazy good songs sung not only by but about him. Yul Brynner, of course, has the tenor whipped near to death for his insolence. This is his right as a baritone leading man.

How did this happen? When did tenors begin brandishing foils and hopping about and shrieking at baritones in their silly voices (as though a baritone would ever be intimidated by such a thing)? When did the tenor usurp the baritone’s role as a mature, complex, deeply thoughtful leading man?

Let us take Colm Wilkinson as an example. Great Irish tenor, and internationally acclaimed. I grew up watching him in the 10th Anniversary “Dream Cast” concert DVD of Les Miserables. Honestly, the man is the only Jean Valjean as far as I’m concerned. But, pray, let us consider this picture of Colm performing in Canada not long ago.

He is an old man with an accoustic guitar. In Canada. It’s as though, for reasons known only to him, your grandpa decided to dress in all black and initiate a campfire sing-along.

For contrast, let’s look at Phillip Quast, who played Javert opposite Colm in the Les Mis dream cast. Javert, in typical modern musical style, is the menacing obsessive cop/stalker/revenge driven villain of the piece. This man sings a suicide song like none you’ve ever heard, musing about why Colm did not kill him when he had the chance (perhaps because Colm is a tenor? Tenors are not capable of killing anyone). Check out the video, you’ll even see Colm at the beginning. Quast is the sexy one.

He is driven, he is highly motivated, he is a man with a plan. Not for one second in the show does he waver in his duty – it would be beneath most police inspectors to pursue a petty thief and chain-gang escapee over twenty years and at least five cities, but dammit, Jean Valjean got away on his watch, and Javert will violate anyone’s jurisdiction to get him back. This is clearly above and beyond the call of duty, and, I think, deserving of a gritty Scorsese movie adaptation.

Colm, on the other hand, is sort of floating along being a reborn Christian and nice to everybody, adopting orphans, running towns and factories, saving people from the barricades, turning himself in to save an innocent man, etc.

Philip Quast: Sexy

No offense to Victor Hugo or Colm Wilkinson, but doesn’t this guy seem a little….vanilla? He would not be fun to hang out with. He’d probably just read the bible aloud, or something (“What does the Book of Job mean to you?”). Javert, though – you know he never goes home. He’s at the jail, filing his 20-year-felon-pursuit paperwork; or actively chasing Valjean; or drowning his sorrows in a local tavern with a glass of good wine, staring blankly at the wall, telling hair-curling stories to ragged seadogs and debilitating anyone who gets out of line with one punch. He’s mysterious, and badass enough to operate outside the law to serve justice. If you had a thing with Javert, you know you’d be one of many, but, oh, it’d be worth it, even when he said “I see the law being violated over there, gotta go,” ran off, and never called again.

For an odd construction in both modern and traditional baritone paradigms, look no farther than Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! Both the male lead and the creepy villan are baritones. Leading man Gordon McRae (who looks like Robert Mitchum) did a phenomenal job. He also did a great job in Carousel, a charming little show about domestic violence, tackling the classic baritone marathon “Soliloquy,” which was also sung beautifully by John Raitt and Samuel Ramey for Broadway, and Frank Sinatra for fun.

Rolfe, the gangly, mailman/nazi

And what of The Sound of Music’s Captain Von Trapp and his dulcet “Edelwiss“? You know who was a tenor in The Sound of Music? Rolfe. The gangly mailman/nazi.

That makes it pretty simple, yes? Baritone or nazi? I’m going to have to go with the baritone.

Let’s bring back the days when baritones were the touchstones of musicals. Let’s write new music for them so we don’t have to keep revisiting Rodgers and Hammerstein clunkers to get our sexy baritone fix. Rodgers and Hammerstein are not the apex of musical theatre, their shows were depressing and predictable, and, as near as I can tell, a sort of “gateway” musical theatre that sucks in people who don’t know how cool Sondheim is yet.

No matter how much I love listening to “Soliloquy,” I can only sit through “Carousel” so many times.

Calvin and I like to paint Warhammer figurines, watch The West Wing, and yell at people on the internet.

Warhammer, for the uninitiated, is an addictive and expensive hobby which involves the acquisition and painting of small plastic and metal creatures which are totally awesome. These creatures are then assembled into armies of different point values which can square off against each other in accordance with very complicated rules which I do not understand at all (I just like the painting part).

This is the first guy I painted - a Wood Elf riding a War Hawk

The story of how I began painting “mens” as Calvin calls them, is a stereotypical one: Boy becomes mildly obsessed with something, girl, noting that boy is increasingly absorbed by said thing, begins to participate, if only to interact with him more. So now at least half of our date nights are spent sitting very happily on the floor, giving color to increasingly detailed models. The whole thing is incredibly geeky.

I will sprinkle pictures of some dudes Calvin and I painted throughout the post. They took lots of manhours, but it’s some fantastic work, well worth it.

While we paint, we like to watch the West Wing, for simple, easy-to-understand reasons:

1) It is the best show ever

2) We really, really wish that President Bartlett were the real president

3) It is the best show ever

The show follows the staff of a fictitious White House during a thoughtful, intelligent, democratic administration which, in a cruel twist of irony, mirrors the chronology of Dubya’s. Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue is without peer, witty and sparkling, and the material dealt with is more intelligent than in any other show, before or since.

There’s one episode in the third season, entitled “The U.S. Poet Laureate,” in which Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman discovers a website dedicated to him, “LemonLymon.com.” He attempts to post to the message board to straighten out some misconceptions, and is immediately swarmed upon with the internet’s usual interest in minutia, inflammatory ideas, and anti-intellectualism. This includes, as Josh says, “a page and a half of posts discussing whether or not I was mocking Egyptians by referencing Sanskrit.”

Press Secretary C.J. Cregg is eventually called upon to get Josh to stop posting on the site.

The cast of "The West Wing"

“C.J., it’s a crazy place,” Josh tries to explain. “There’s this dictatorial leader, who I’m sure wears a muumuu and chain-smokes Parliaments…”

“Lemmie explain something to you, this is sort of my field,” C.J. barks.

“The people on these sites? They’re the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The mumu wearing chainsmoker? That’s Nurse Ratched. When Nurse Ratched is unhappy, the patients are unhappy. You? You’re McMurphy, you swoop in there with your card games and your fishing tricks…”

“I didn’t swoop in, I came in the same way everybody else did.”

“Well, now I’m telling you to open the ward window and climb out of there before they give you a pre-frontal lobotomy and I have to come in and smother you with a pillow.”

This is a lesson which Calvin and I have recently learned in our internet travels. It started out innocently enough, when I discovered a conservative homeschooler blog comparing The Honorable Mr. Obama to Adolf Hitler.

This may sound like an absolutely preposterous allegation, but it’s one that gets bandied around a lot more than you’d think. The conventional wisdom amongst the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest seems to be as follows:

1) Lots of people liked Hitler. Lots of people like Obama. Suspicious, anyone?

2) Hitler was elected in a Germany that was economically depressed. America is economically depressed. How long can you stay blind, America?

3) Hitler gave a good speech. Obama gives a good speech. Would you condemn your children to such a future? What kind of American are you?

I quote the blog in question:

“Like Hitler, Obama uses simple messages to win over people.
Like Hitler, Obama seeks to disband freedoms.
Like Hitler, Obama supporters faint and cry when he speaks.
Like Hitler, Obama campaigns on hope.
Like Hitler, Obama speaks of change.
Like Hitler, Obama campaigns on unity.
Like Hitler, Obama is popular in a time of economic weakness.
Like Hitler, Obama has an emblem/seal.
Like Hitler, Obama targets youth.”

Perhaps Obama doesn’t seek to exterminate anyone – but who is he really?

Anyway, I told Calvin about this blog, run by a woman who is a genuine melt-all-your-gold-lock-yourself-in-the-basement-educate-your-own-children-in-knot-tying-and-
the-finer-points-of-squirrel-cuisine-because-the-Red-Dawn-Sarah-Connor-apocalypse-is-nigh-
Ron-Paul-devotee. Calvin, who is seasoned and practiced in internet arguing, posted a neat little comment in response:

“Like Hitler, Jesus uses simple messages to win over people.
Like Hitler, Jesus seeks to disband freedoms.
Like Hitler, Jesus supporters faint and cry when he speaks.
Like Hitler, Jesus campaigns on hope.
Like Hitler, Jesus speaks of change.
Like Hitler, Jesus campaigns on unity.
Like Hitler, Jesus is popular in a time of economic weakness.
Like Hitler, Jesus has an emblem/seal.
Like Hitler, Jesus targets youth.”

Fixed for pointing out how many straws you’re grasping at.

Good day.

Bet she's voting McCain

I was delighted by this, and told him so. We reveled for awhile in this total ownage, just as Josh did, but then Nurse Ratched fired up her inmates.

The arguments ranged from the completely un-thought-out and grammar confused (“Jesus was sincere and was about love. Those surrounding Hitler and Obama were about hate”) to the clueless, poor analogies (“I was thinking this week how much this European tour reminded me of Eva Peron and her tour of Europe in ‘Evita’”) to total missing of the point (“Jesus was not a politician. Far from it!”) to the inexplicable (“Yes, there are many similarities. And they are not to be dismissed lightly. Because, after all, Hitler was a major PR campaign. And if you think that PR campaigns don’t work, ask CocaCola”).

One or two cited books such as The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as historical treatises which bore out their anti-Honorable Mr. Obama arguments. While I haven’t read this particular book, I did go through a WWII phase when I was a college freshman, and I read many books on the Nazi administration, politics, and history. One of the most interesting things I learned was that Heinrich Himmler was obsessed with movie adaptation of Gone With the Wind, and took his cues from Hollywood when choreographing the Nazis’ theatrical, dramatic spectacles of rallies.

This is a small piece of a work-in-progress

Therefore, I think we should raise the alarm if any of the presidential candidates express a positive opinion of the movie.

But back to the discussion of the blog – this is where I leapt into the fray. My comment, considerably less measured than Calvin’s, was intended to stir everyone up with a well-placed zinger, addressing several people who had referred to The Honorable Mr. Obama as a “socialist” or “communist.”

I had prepared a much longer comment, one I intended to cut through all of the hyperbole and utter preposterousness above.
But my response to your comment alone scaled several pages, and I eventually came to feel that devoting so much text and time to refuting immature and ill-formed logic was both pointless and stressful.
So I’ll mention only one thing – your characterization of Obama as a “Socialist.”
How is he both a socialist and Hitler? As I recall, Hitler was a fascist, and foamed at the mouth about how those dirty reds were destroying Germany.
But, of course, they both end in “ist,” so I can see your confusion.
Perhaps a freshman civics class would be advisable before you try to talk politics with the grownups.

On his end, however, Calvin continued to be reasonable, saying:

“If you think that drawing crowds, appealing to young people and talking about hope were what made Hitler bad for the world, you don’t know enough about Hitler.
Hitler was bad because he suspended civil liberties and killed Jews. If you have some actual evidence that Obama will literally do that, then we can talk, but all you have is a similarity between their campaigns.
Sorry, but talking about hope and change to large crowds does not alone a fascist make.”

This a Vampire Lord, complete with demon

But the best part, which I haven’t even mentioned yet, are the responses from Nurse Ratched herself. She is highly entertaining because she has a tenuous grasp on both politics and logic.

“Hitler wooed the masses just like Obama is doing,” She asserts. “The methods being used are the same. You can disagree.”

Um. OK. I don’t disagree. But I would argue that those “methods” which Hitler and Obama share are also shared by pretty much every politician ever, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and, hmm, Ron Paul. Now, I know what you’re going to say – “But PenguinDust, The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ron Paul are about love, and Hitler and Obama are about hate!!!111!”

Yes, yes, I know it’s difficult to imagine that Herr Obama has anything in common with Saint Paul, but think for just a moment:

Like Obama, Ron Paul uses simple messages to win over people.
Like Obama, Ron Paul campaigns on hope.
Like Obama, Ron Paul speaks of change.
Like Obama, Ron Paul campaigns on unity.
Like Obama, Ron Paul is popular in a time of economic weakness.
Like Obama, Ron Paul has an emblem/seal.
Like Obama, Ron Paul targets youth.

By now, I imagine you are stunned. “Why PenguinDust!” you are probably now saying, “I never considered such similarities between these two politicians!” Yes. I know you did not. Which is why I am here. However, Nurse Ratched remained unconvinced.
She goes on to deny that Godwin’s Law is valid, saying “Nah – I don’t think that is true, and I don’t accept ‘Godwin’s Law’ as gospel either.”

I have three problems with this statement:

1) Contrary to popular belief, Godwin’s Law does not judge the appropriateness of the Hitler reference, it only acknowledges the increasing probability of it occurring.

2) As people continue to use the internet, the data seems to have borne out Godwin’s 1990 assertion.

3) To quote my beloved Strunk and White: “If you use a colloquialism or a slang word or phrase, simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as

This is my most recent project, an Ork (with a Rokkit Launcher)

though you were inviting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better.”

She violated the colloquium rule a second time in a snippy, whiny response to my comment.

“Your comments were incredibly rude and uncalled for and certainly does not exhibit any measure of “grown-up” discourse. Perhaps you should visit a grade school and learn some manners.
Furthermore, rude posts will be deleted.
It is fine if you disagree – but please you need not be rude or condescending.”

When I saw this, I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. The subject-verb disagreement in the first sentence, the previously mentioned colloquial violation (although I suppose one could argue she was quoting me), and the massive flaws in logic? The thing is freaking hilarious.

First, it blows my mind that anyone would suggest that my comment – trust me, I could have gone much, much ruder had I chosen to – was ruder than comparing anyone to the most antisemitic, racist, genocidal, dictatorial, fascist, mentally disturbed, inbred, intolerant, evil individual in modern history.

As Jon Stewart once said of those who make Hitler comparisons: “You know who was like Hitler? Hitler.”

Second, I find it hilarious that a self-professed homeschooling mom who seems to think public schools want to indoctrinate her children with anti-Ron Paul lies would tell me to “go to grade school and learn some manners.”

Pray, tell me, Nurse Ratched, is grade school the only place one can learn manners? What did I, a child homeschooled from kindergarten through high school, who enrolled in community college at the age of fifteen, made straight As, and is now in the process of transferring to a major university (where I intend to complete my master’s and doctoral work) miss in a public grade school?

Ah. Manners. The same thing her kids presumably missed, being homeschooled, and everything. I’ve got it now.

She then gathered her wits and responded to a post in which Calvin posited that one of Hitler’s defining characteristics was rabid nationalism, and that “Obama certainly doesn’t seem to be furthering any amero-centric nationalism, unless I missed that speech.” She put her sterling wit on display once again.

“Yes…it’s a pity that Obama is not pro-America. His wife certainly isn’t, nor are some of the people he associates with.”

This is a guy in a monacle riding a mechanical horse

To quote Calvin – “Wait, what?”

But my man rallied, and posted something which was so articulate and well-reasoned that we decided it would be our final salvo, our cue to climb out the ward window before anyone had to get smothered with a pillow. More policy geniuses have posted since (notably someone who said, “Once again, shame on you…you know in your heart that you should indeed be ashamed for trivializing the Holocaust in order to gain cheap political points,” and was criticized for “hiding behind anonymity,”) but for us, the argument is over.

I leave you with Calvin’s argumentative brilliance, and instruct you forward: to read the full Saga of PenguinDust and Calvin Take on the Cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, click through to Nurse Ratched’s blog here. Prepare to be taken aback, if only by her extremely lame comeback to what is reproduced below.

“You seem to have confused patriotism and nationalism in my comments. I assure you I meant the latter.

A patriot may love their country and still have things they wish to change. The fact that you disagree on those points does not make them anti-American. It is very American to disagree and it is very American to be disagreed with and above all, it is very American to want what is best for your country. You and Obama have differing opinions on what needs to happen in America. That’s just fine, because simply having opinions about what’s best for America is what makes a patriot, not what those opinions are. It is the concern for and the love of country that makes the patriot.

This means that both yourself AND Mr. Obama are patriots, even though you disagree and that’s just fine and if I may say so myself, very American.

So by all means, have this discussion. Criticize Obama’s platform and views, free and open debate is pivotal to a healthy government of the people. But personally, I think it’s childish to compare someone to Hitler because they draw large crowds and use similar appeals, as I said before, it wasn’t Hitler’s crowds and appeals that spawned Godwin’s Law, it was the Holocaust.

Try to remember that Obama and his supporters are people just like you. They want what they want

Calvin painted this - it's a Tyranid, an insectoid creature which I call "Icky" and he says can "produce stabbity-stabbity death."

because they love America and want to see it be the best it can be, just like you do. Try to think about where they’re coming from before you put them in the same boat as famous dictators. If you want to make comparisons, maybe try using more comparable figures. There are plenty of our past presidents and leaders with much more valid similarities to Obama, some of them good and some of them quite bad. 1930s Germany was a completely different country in a completely different time making it quite a bit more difficult to draw effective parallels and be taken seriously.

And from patriot to patriot, I want to tell you that your arguments in this posting, regardless of the merit you believe them to have, will be largely ignored in their current form simply because of Godwin. I strongly urge you to raise the level of the conversation above this sort of rhetoric.”