Monday, December 22, 2008

I Feel Your Pain

by Father

"After Obama gets finished raising my taxes," the guy said to me at a recent Christmas party, completely unsolicited, I might add.  Caught off guard, I mumbled something like "I think he's really a fine man," and slinked away.  In the old days I would have uttered an obscenity, but the new me is trying really hard to not go ballistic with these people.  After all, we won, didn't we?

My new, prepared response (uttered in my best sympathetic tone), "I understand.  I know how you must feel," really throws them off balance.  Their puzzled response is something like, "What do you mean by that?"

Well, see, it's like this:

Republicans believed, after the 2000 election, that the Liberal cause was dead, Conservatives would rule government for the next forty years and the Democratic Party would be a relic of the past.  Instead, it looks like the opposite could be true, although I'm realistic enough to know that forty years is an infinity in political years.

All the Country got from Republican domination was the Bush Doctrine (bomb early and avoid the rush), a disastrous and seemingly endless war, eight years of scandal (Abramoff, Larry Craig, pedophile/prostitute-loving Congressmen), domestic surveillance, tortured prisoners of war, unlimited imprisonment, worldwide hatred and humiliation, and last but not least, the BANKRUPTCY of America.

So now when "these people" approach me with their in-your-face accusations about what Barack Obama is going to do, it's so easy to say, "I feel your pain."  If they persist, my follow up is, "You must be totally humiliated/disillusioned/discouraged (choose one) by the last eight years."  If they persist, I just repeat, "I really have a lot of empathy/sympathy, etc. for you."  There are about ten different ways to say this and usually they will go away and leave me alone.

God I feel so enlightened.  No more political arguments.

Hey, maybe the" Greedy Old Party" still thinks the 2012 elections will turn things around for them.

I can see it now:  Sarah Palin accepting her nomination for the presidency with yet another infant in her arms and performing the ritual "Passing of the Baby," standing beside her pregnant daughter, Bristol (with her fourth child), who will be accompanied by fiancee Levi (no date has been set for the wedding) and Levi's just-released-from-prison-on-a-felony-drug-conviction mother.  Palin will be campaigning on a Family Values/Forgiveness platform.

So all is not lost, you poor, downtrodden Republicans.

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