I think it's time to start preparing to ease the Obamabots back into the real world. The signs are starting to appear here and there, like signs of Spring.
Living, as I do, in The People's Republic of Portland (Hawthorne Soviet, Richmond Collective) I've been in the thick of Obamabot zombieland. During the primaries there were forests of Obama signs strewn about the landscape, houses with three and four signs in the windows, on the lawn, big banners hung across the porch railing. One guy built a lawn housing for his Obama sign, complete with turned columns and a broken pediment on the top, indicating that he intended his sign to last for generations. Shop windows on Hawthorne Blvd. were plastered with Obama signs both before and after the election (“Yes, We Did!”) coffeehouses and taverns held weekly Obama parties – some still do - and there were hordes of Obama canvassers swarming every street corner, I was accosted by six of them in one ten block stretch in the run up to the election.
All last year and well into February of this year, you rarely had a conversation without one or two Obamabots bursting into an impromptu praise-a-thon.
I think that things are beginning to change here on the Left Coast. We've had a, relatively, hard winter – snow on the valley floor several times, once it stuck for more than a week.
A short word here about Portlanders: I like them a lot, I like their weird ways, their optimistic self-reliance, their fundamental courtesy, but you'd think that folks who spend so much time in the rain would know how to drive in it – and snow! They see snowflakes come down and just hafta rush out to drive the old beater with the bald tires to see how many 360's they can do down the hill on their way to the I-5 where they can spin out in front of a oncoming semi. I swear there's a secret prize waiting for the first person to completely block the highway.
Back to the Bots: the signs are far fewer now, one by one they're disappearing, usually in the middle of the night, the cars are showing bumpersticker scraper stigmata, the eager young canvassers are now back to self-righteously assuming you care nothing about starving children or dying whales or evaporating boreal forests. No one advertises Obama block parties in the community newpapers. The “Yes, We Did!” signs have vanished, their spaces sometimes replaced with “Quitting Business” signs. The street buskers are more numerous, they now have turf scuffles with the old familiar beggars who believe they have squatter's rights to prime territory, the corner by the bank, the service doorway of the supermarket...
Late winter reflection time, the gray days when you look in the mirror a lot. I think the Obots are poised at the edge of the abyss, so...
I'm proposing we set up a 12-step recovery group for them – someone's got to do it, we can't have them wandering glassy-eyed about the landscape, arms outstretched, grasping blindly for another hit of the “O-juice”.
First: what to call it? OA is taken, I believe, (Overeaters Anonymous) so I'm proposing OBA (pronounced: obey) for ObamaBots Anonymous.
The ObamaBots Anonymous 12-step Recovery Program:
Step 1 - We admit we are powerless over our Obama addiction - that our lives have become unmanageable and that we are prone to hissy fits and screaming “I don't understand!” at inappropriate moments.
Step 2 – We have come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity but that this Power is NOT Obama.
Step 3 – We have made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Obama as we understood Him - no, wait, we already did that... we mean we have decided that we will NOT turn our every waking thought over to Obama.
Step 4 – We have made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. We have looked into the mirror and said ”I am a moron who has thrown his/her rational thought processes out the window in favor of mindless adulation of a sociopathic, narcissistic sock-puppet.”
Step 5 – We admit to the world, to ourselves and to another human being – preferably someone who told us we were idiots to support Obama - the exact nature of our wrongs: see Step 4.
Step 6 - We're entirely ready to have a frying pan to the side of the head or a dentist with a high-speed drill or a construction worker with a jackhammer, remove all these defects of character depending on just how dumb we were.
Step 7 – We have humbly asked if there's some kind of capable Power which can remove our shortcomings and return our brains.
Step 8 – We've made a list of all persons we have harmed, and are willing to make amends to them all: you know who we are and we know you know – we prefer cash, please.
Step 9 – We have made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others - you don't get to make these kinds of judgment calls anymore, the evidence shows you're spectacularly bad at it - pay up.
Step 10 – We continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong promptly admit it. ...we're waiting...
Step 11 – We seek, through prayer and adoration to improve our conscious contact with Obama as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of Obama's will for us and the power to carry out His will... NO, NO, NO! Stop trying to get O's Blackberry address, put down the tripleshot, soy chai latte and remember Steps 1-10... Jeez! Get a grip willya!
Step 12 - Having had a rational thought process re-awakening as the result of these steps, we will carry this message to other Obamabots, and attempt to de-program these poor fools and bring them back to reality.
I think that a whole-hearted embrace of these steps by recovering Obamabots will go a long way toward re-integrating them into the real world again. Of course they'll probably have to go to OBA meetings for a long, long time and we should be as gentle as possible with them, don't shock them by pointing out things like: all O's 'ideas' are stolen in part or as a whole from others (like Hillary) who actually had thought about how to implement their plans. This kind of shock may be too much for OBAs, cases have been known where they go directly into CDS and may require hospitalization.
Remember, they were thinking humans once, with time and care they may become so again – they can Change and there's always Hope.
4 comments:
Hey Craig:
Maybe the reason yard signs and bumperstickers are disappearing and people are no longer canvassing for Obama is that the election has been over for 4 months now and people have resumed their normal lives. People who have normal lives that is.
You NQ denizens are on shaky ground pointing the cultist label at anyone as you hang out with conspiracy mongering smear merchants, the folks who brought you the whitey tape hoax and who write posts that Obama's electon eve deathbed visit to his grandmother was a cynical ploy for sympathy. By the by, please point out to "Susan UnPC" that Michelle and Hillary were BOTH wearing purple, the "color of privilege and royalty" at Women's History Day.
Finally, you want to convince anyone they made a mistake voting for Obama, then make the case that the alternative, the cranky senescent know-nothing and his snowmobile queen running mate, would be doing any better.
David Borthwick, dbborthwick@yahoo.com
David:
Thanks for responding it's nice to find some people at The Heraclitan Fire.
I publish at NQ because they let me and they have a far greater readership than I do. Also, I've found them to be pretty broad minded folks, unlike many other so-called left wing blogs. But I agree that a lot of the signs came down simply because it's time to move on.
I really didn't give a damn about the Whitey tapes except insofar as they might have helped derail Obama and, frankly, I think Obama's visit to Hawaii wasn't to garner sympathy but was a cover for him to make sure his birth certificate issue was buried good and deep. I had no interest in the color purple flap, so I don't know what that's about.
I do have conspiracy theories, however, and I'm writing about some of them (coming soon to a blog near you). I think there was a vast corporate media conspiracy to elect Obama and as a result of that conspiracy virtually no investigative reporting was done on Obama, I think it's very disturbing that Obama was able to raise 1 billion dollars to, essentially, buy the Presidency - see the September numbers (better than $150 million), look at the deliberate lack of security and lack of verification on the Obama donations website and ask yourself where the money came from. I think he ran a racist, sexist campaign and doesn't deserve to be dogcatcher. And, of course, there's more, much much more.
But you don't even need conspiracy theories, nor do you need to listen to my admittedly biased opinions - just look at what's happening, look at fumbling, bumbling amateur hour reality of the Obama administration.
Then ask yourself how we could have done worse.
Which of course leads us to McCain. Would he be my first choice? No, I wanted Hillary (btw, the only bright spot in O's administration running an interestingly separate Foreign Policy Presidency - Samantha Powers and Susan Rice must be frothing at the mouth to get their shivs into her). But McCain had some sterling qualities that you apparently missed: he is an honest man - as Obama is not, which we knew and you are just starting to find out. McCain is also a true reformer (example: the McCain-Feingold act), pretty much the last thing that Wall Street and the transnational corporations (where the campaign money comes from) wanted - btw did you know that all the big corporate and Wall Street money that normally goes to Republicans went to Obama this election? Why is that, do you think?
Last, I think you have been bamboozled by the corporate press on Ms. Palin. After the blatant woman-hating vilification of Hillary during the primaries by the press, they started right in on Sarah Palin with the exact same tactics - and apparently no one noticed. Hatchet job 'interviews', blatant woman-hating screeds, "Sarah Palin is a C**t" teeshirts. I guess this stuff was Ok because the press wouldn't try character assassination on a vice presidential candidate in order to sway an election, would they? And you think the NQ folks are 'conspiracy mongering smear merchants', look to your own house, David.
The funny thing is: I don't agree with Ms Palin's personal beliefs nor do I agree with most of her political positions but when she was first asked about the abortion issue her answer showed that she clearly understood the difference between personal belief and the responsibility of an elected official to enforce the law - and that's the important thing, don't you think?
Cheers,
Craig
0
Obama-non? Fun read.
Well, they wouldn't be able to complete step 8 because the list of people they've harmed by voting for His Noxious Incompetence is endless. Nor step 9. Even if there were some kind of moral corrective for their actions, and there isn't, it would escape their notice because...well, they voted for him. Les pauvres.
Hello Craig,
I have read your blog a few times in the past. I like your writing style when you discuss politics. I was a Hillar supporter, but have come to not appreciate her as much as I did in the past do to her acceptance of the Secretary of State position in the Obama administration. I no longer view her in quite the same way. I don't wish her any bad, but I am disappointed in her.
I am a registered Democrat in Florida, but I am going to drop my party membership soon. I am disgusted with the current Democratic party, and I find my moderate self being drawn to a more conservative train of thought. I agree that Sarah Palin was maligned in much the same way that Hillary Clinton was. I have come to respect Sarah more so than Hillary. In a Sarah versus Hillary contest, I would support Sarah, and that is a big change for me.
Anyway, I read the comment above from the Obama supporter. I pay no mind to their mindless chatter. Most of them are rather pathetic in my book. The fact is that they helped elect a big zero, and one can never obtain anything from nothing.
Best wishes.
Post a Comment