God loves a black woman president

I'm getting tired of the on-again-off-again debate about whether race or gender is more astonishing in the democratic primary. The only upside to it will be if the thrill of voting in a potentially "history making" election gets democrats out to vote.

Here are my arguments against:

• It's only historic because we're backwards. Blacks and women have been elected to leadership positions for years abroad. We're not forging new ground; we're (as usual) showing up to the party late, drunk, and announcing that the party can now begin. Utterly bloody heedless.
• It's irrelevant. If you're voting based on race or gender, you're a fucking nitwit. If I were hiring someone and the HR rep who's supposed to be researching the candidates came and said, "we've got these two candidates. One's Black and the other's a woman. Which one do you want?", I'd fire my HR rep on the spot. The press is the HR rep in this labored analogy. Anyway, point is, I'm not voting for McCain, despite being male and white. It's racist and insulting for the media to keep presuming that Blacks and women are tunnel-vision, single-issue voters.

Now what would really be an amazing historic turning point for the U.S. (though again not so much for the rest of the world) would be an avowed atheist getting the nod. And frankly, that's more and more important, since candidates are now making promises and policy based on religious doctrine. The debates on abortion, gay marriage, and even for the love of all that is good, education, are now being affected by religion.

And if it's frightening to some people that the president might not have naughty bits the same shape or color as their own, it should be catastrophically terror-inducing that he or she might make policy based on dicta handed down by an imaginary being in the sky.

By comparison with that, race or gender shouldn't matter a damn, but you notice we don't hear a lot about that.

Clinton also huge racist, according to our stupid media

Alright, that's it. I'm voting for the BBC.

Hot on the heels of the news that Clinton is a woman, the press now give us the revelation that she's a racist. The kind who hates Martin Luther King Jr.

It's like Dave Snowden identifies here. In addition to pointing out how misogynist the Democratic race has become, he suggests that our culture often prefers a good story over the truth.

Hillary may have ridden the "comeback-queen" archetype to victory in NH because people wanted to live the story, but I doubt it was the electorate that was beguiled by the opportunity to join a fairytale. We're all guilty of liking this sort of thing as a culture, but the press craves it like sugar-coated crack because we like to hear about it and they like to keep their jobs.

Now listen, I don't hate Baby Jessica (or puppies), but most days of the week I literally couldn't tell her from a hole in the ground.
photo by sleestak66

Their ratings and salaries depend on selling a story, so the moment some photogenic moppet falls down a well we get Baby Jessica. The press is guilty of putting this easy-to-digest pablum in front of us, but we're guilty of cleaning our plates to make room for more.

So the press loves a story and we love an archetype. When that headstrong Clinton lady (who is a lady, and should know better than to state opinions different from ours) started talking smack about Dr. Martin Luther King, the press gasped, peed itself quietly with glee and started "objectively reporting" that Hillary was angry that Obama had injected racial something-or-other into the election.

It's simple, we've got our MLK story down. We don't want people mucking with it. He single-handedly ended racism in our country thank you very much. LBJ can go screw himself.

Now not everyone in the press got hold of this, but Clinton had to go to an event honoring MLK to sort this nonsense out. Apparently Obama is now taking the high road and saying we shouldn't be tit-for-tatting this early in the election. Great.

I wish that the press would, for the love of decency, stop offering up pre-digested mythology and start investigating the truth. Stop insulting the intelligence of your audience. Do you really think Senator Clinton is a huge racist? If not, why let the rumor start moving? Here's an example of something you might aspire to. The rest of you, stop it.