What Has Happened to Sensibility?

I am proud to say that I have made thousands of calls to a battleground state, New Mexico in the past couple of weeks. The vast majority of people that I speak with are reasonable, sensible and friendly people, and almost all of them declare their support for Obama. But there was a woman yesterday that really got under my skin, and she cajoled me to check into several of her allegations that Barack Obama was unfit to run, much less be president of the United States.

I did allot much more time to this woman than I usually do, because although I had such a high amount of skepticism while speaking with her, she was polite and expressed herself with sincerity. But I’ve been around the block a few times, and having been involved in this campaign for well over a year and a half, I have had to defend the record and virtue of Barack enough times. But what has happened to people’s sensibilities? It seems that the toxic environment that has been created by the McCain-Palin campaign in complicity with Right Wing talk has encouraged and enabled some people in this country to suspend all vestiges of reality.

So what did I hear? The standard line of Obama haters. Barack Obama is a citizen of Kenya; that his birth certificate is phony and is only a certification of some kind, not an official document. I also heard that Barack’s affiliation with terrorists isn’t limited to William Ayers, but that he literally communicates with up to a hundred domestic and international terrorists. I also heard yesterday that Barack has been intimately involved with his cousin in Kenya , somehow attempting to get him elected to office so that they can combine power and take over this country for Muslims and for Kenya.

Well, I know that these things aren’t factual in any way, and just simple common sense will tell me that. It is beyond comprehension to believe that a United States Senator can be complicit in any one of these accusations without it being discovered long ago. It is also not credible that just one of these issues if not more would not have made it to the mainstream press.

I did express my feelings to this woefully uninformed woman in New Mexico, and she told me that this is understandable, because Saudi Arabia owns half of the American media, even Fox News. When I told her that I just didn’t believe that statistic, she informed me what also hadn’t come out is that Obama has been endorsed by Moammar Khadafi, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and the entire country of Pakistan. She also threw in that Obama would work to eliminate Israel’s existence in favor of Palestine.

I decided to spend sometime yesterday and last night listening to KSFO, the San Francisco Right Wing radio station, and I now understand more clearly where this crap is coming from. I heard that Obama travels on a Kenyan passport, that Obama regularly meets with the Odinga tribe of Kenya and will not admit that he’s part of their political structure and that Obama refuses to discuss his ties to William Ayers and other people who have targeted this country as domestic terrorists.

The amount of hate and vitriol that comes out of several talk programs that I listened to is completely false, and if subjected to a truth meter, I doubt that even one of their allegations can withstand the smell test that anyone interested in facts could expose their venomous words to. But people like me and probably you cannot stand to listen to this kind of hate too long, and that leaves these stations to the people who are most vulnerable to this kind of message and are so filled with rage or hate that they just really want to believe. That is true of this woman in New Mexico who, while feeling that she has truth on her side, is really just listening to a one-sided and biased argument that is preying on just such a person.

I am absolutely delighted that we are down to our last 18 days of this presidential campaign. It will be nice to go back to a little more life as usual and maybe have a lot of these people go back to worrying about how to pay their bills and whether they’ll have a job to go to by the time that George W. Bush and the Republican-dominated Congress leave office and end their dominance of this country.