“I’M CONFUSED”

Maybe you can help me?

I'm a little confused by some of the news reports. Let me see if I have this straight.....

• If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you’re “exotic, different.”
• Grow up in Alaska eating moose meat, you’re a quintessential American story.

• If your name is Barack, you must secretly be a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
• If you name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, aah, how cute.

• If you graduated from Harvard Law School, you are elitist.
• If you were third from the bottom in your class, you're well grounded.

• If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veterans' Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
• If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.

• If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
• If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a paragon of virtue and honor.

• If you advocate womens’ choice, you are a murder.
• If you favor the death penalty, pre-emptive attacks, extensive bombings and shrug off hundreds of thousand of civilian casualties as inconsequential, you are a realist.

• If you insist all the Constitution be defended as required by oaths of office, you want to endanger the country.
• If you support spying without warrants, imprisonment without counsel or trial, and that torture is just a word easily redefined, you are a man of honor.

• If you dare to question a policy or ask for less secrecy or accountability, you have committed treason and probably support al Quida.
• If you oppose dissent and are afraid to talk to the press, you are tough.

• If you seek to find out what went wrong in order to correct the problem, you are stuck in the past.
• If you insist that despite what your opponent says about cutting taxes for all except the uber rich he must be lying because his party always raises taxes, then you merely drawing appropriate inferences from what has gone before.

• If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control and warnings about sexual predators, you are eroding the fiber of society.
• If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

• If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America's.
• If your husband is nicknamed 'First Dude', with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

• If you change your mind on how to fund your campaign, you are a foppish Flip-Flopper.
• If you abandon all your previous stated principles from the prior decade in order to solidify your base, you are a pragmatist.

• If you long ago was on a large committee with someone who once advocated bombing to protest war but never actually harmed anyone or did jail time, you nevertheless consort with terrorists who can never ever change.
• If you share the same stage in the last year with someone who advocated assassination or on a radio program with someone who illegally ran guns to terrorists and welcome their endorsement, well . . . people should be forgiven.

• If you make any observation you are black, you’re a militant, black power racist.
• If you remind everyone your opponent is black and allow buttons to be sold at your rallies saying that if a black man is elected we can no longer refer to it as the “White House,” you are merely being fair and pointing out the obvious.

• If you favor getting allies to support positions and seek international accord before invading, you are a wussy.
• If you have a nasty temper and threaten Russia despite having no military resources to back up the empty threat, you are macho.

• If you favor getting out of a war that has lasted longer than any other except the Vietnam one based on a timetable that your allies and the President agree on, you are a surrender monkey.
• If you chose to ignore all your allies including those you placed in power, you are an independent thinker.

• If you pack stadiums both home and abroad, you are a worthless celebrity.
• If you are a female Republican doing so, you are merely interesting.

OK, much clearer now.

(Note: Normally, everything in this blog is my own musing, but thanks are due and a tip of the hat for some of the above bullet points to an anonymous internet item in circulation.)