How the haters and bigots have wasted a decade of their lives

Pretty soon Obama will be gone and you will have to face up to the fact that you will have lost a whole decade of your life passing around conspiracy theories and whipping yourself into a frenzy of hatred. All of you lost friends, severed relationships with family members, and some of you even lost your job or your marriage due to your unhinged behavior. You lost that decade wailing about Obama the gay Communist Muslim narcissist dictator who was going to let the UN invade America and various hoaxes like “death panels,” birth certificates, and the “Ground Zero Mosque” (remember how you wasted two years of your life over that?). Just think of what you could have accomplished if you hadn’t wasted all that time. You could have gotten a college degree, you could have written a book, you could have run your first marathon, you could have built a boat and sailed it around the world. You could learned to speak another language - oh wait, you never would have done that. You kept waiting for Obama to be impeached or for the GOP candidates to “take off the gloves.” But they never did because your favorite stories were hoaxes, and the GOP can’t impeach or win the White House based on hoaxes.

Over the past six years, we’ve been subjected to all manner of crackpots treated by the mainstream media as if they have something legitimate and reasonable to add to the public discourse. In reality, it’s more often than not been an exercise in ignorance, racism, hyper-religiosity, science denial, or combinations of the above. Seldom has the reality of our new idiocracy been more concrete and tangible. We have birthers, vaccine truthers, gun nuts, and conspiracy theorists of all shapes, sizes, and flavors. We have people willing to believe whatever lies and Right-wing propaganda Fox News Channel feeds them, even as they’re unwilling to consider the truth that “Fair and Balanced” is anything but.

Barack Obama is not a Muslim, a Communist, a Kenyan, a dictator, a slave to Sharia…or any number of other epithets and pejoratives tossed at him by those who can’t beat him on substance and have been reduced to character assassination. Despite of all manner of world-class obstructionism directed at him by Republicans in Congress, this President has actually managed to accrue a significant list of policy victories. No, the Affordable Care Act isn’t anything approaching perfect (it still has significant problems), but it’s a damned sight better than the Third World health care coverage system that existed previously. Two of our longest-running wars have been brought to conclusion, though no reasonable person would claim either as a resounding, legacy-defining victory.