The very personal is political

Readers, I just had to share with you this column from WaPo’s Sally Quinn, which made me laugh out loud with its completely un-self-conscious emotionally naked batshit craziness:

When I was little, I had a recurrent dream that there was a terrible earthquake. My father, his body a horse with wings, swooped down from the sky, kneeled so I could jump on his back and flew away just as the earth cracked open beneath me. It was my most comforting dream.

Holy fucking Freud sandwich on rye toast with mayo and a big phallic kosher pickle on the side, Batman!

If I ever had a dream like that, I’d wake up my boyfriend and tell him to quick, fuck the memory of it right out of me. I wouldn’t go revealing to the whole world that the reason why I’m politically conservative is because I’m a deeply insecure individual with an Electra complex and a near-psychotic fear of sex, and the world in general. Wow. You have to give her points for honesty bordering on a compulsive need for humiliation, I guess.

And what is her column about, that she chose to begin it with such a horrifyingly inappropriate personal revelation?

It’s about evangelist Rick Warren’s interviews at Saddleback church with Obama and McCain.

!

I know. I can’t hardly believe it myself, but it’s dreamy, isn’t it? It’s like a little gift-wrapped Christmas present right there on baby Jesus’s insane op-ed page from hell.

Let’s read some more:

I want to live in that world again. I want to live in John McCain’s world. My father was a military man…

Wow. Huge fucking surprise. No doubt he made The Great Santini look like the Dalai Lama.

…My parents were friends of McCain’s parents and lived in the same apartment building. My father’s closest friend was Barry Goldwater, McCain’s mentor. Those were the days when men were men, when the differences between good and evil were clear, when they knew where they stood on every issue, when life was less complicated, when there was an air of insouciance, no matter how difficult the issues.

Damn right there was an air of insouciance. It was caused by the collective shrugging of all the white people in America when blacks and other minorities came to them and asked if they might please be allowed to vote, and have their own families, and oh, I don’t know, not be beaten randomly on the streets by policemen who no doubt were very clear that they were “men.”

Minorities can be complicated and difficult that way.

Back to Ms. Quinn:

I want to live in a world where Gen. David Petraeus and Meg Whitman, former chief executive of eBay, are the wisest people I know…

Whoa, there, Sally. Hold on. What’s a gal doing heading up a company in this little world of yours? In this world, women are for carrying pregnancies to term, and for staying faithful to their philandering husbands, and for financing, with family money of course, their husband’s political careers, even if they have to mortgage one of their ten homes or their own private jet to do it. Occasionally, women are also for becoming so overwhelmed by the soul-killing hypocrisy and uselessness of a life lived purely for the benefit of men that they become addicted to pills and/or booze. But that’s it. Definitely no CEOing allowed.

Back to Sally’s ideal world:

…where offshore drilling will help ease our energy crisis, where a guy stays in a Vietnamese prison camp even when told he could get out, and has great stories to tell.

Anybody else kinda creeped out by that last remark, by the way? I mean, to me, a “great story” is what you get when you and your pals decide to drive down to Mexico in an old school bus with 10 pounds of shrooms, and instead you end up in a bridesmaid’s dress and a Brazilian wax on a gay cruise to Alaska. Getting beaten and tortured in one of the most notorious prisons in the whole regrettable history of mankind is a life-altering experience, and an amazing personal ordeal, but it’s not a “great story.” Okay, I’m arguing semantics, now. But still. She’s a columnist, for pete’s sake. What does she have to do except get the words right?

I want to live in a world where I was absolutely certain that life begins at conception…

Instead of the world I live in now, where life begins as soon as you are white, and wealthy, and have a degree from Smith.

…where a man is a maverick and stands up against his Senate colleagues when he disagrees with them, where the only thing to do with evil is defeat it, where a guy will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of Hell to capture him.

So…McCain thinks bin Laden is in Iraq, then? Is that why he refuses to get us the hell out of there?

I want to believe that our biggest enemy is radical Islamist terrorists.

Really? What the fuck for? I want to believe that our biggest enemy is high-fructose corn syrup, or people who wear Crocs in public, or pop stars who can’t sing without pitch correction software, but I don’t think I could make a credible case for any of it. The world is a dangerous fucking place, whether I believe it or not. Still it would be comforting to believe that our biggest enemy is the stupefying popularity of Dane Cook. I guess that’s just the difference between me and Ms. Quinn.

I want to be part of a world that doesn't have to raise taxes…

Now, that I believe.

…where America is a beacon, a shining city on a hill; where our values are simply Judeo-Christian values; and where a man always puts his country first.

I just figured out what kind of world I want: a world where the Judeo-Christians don’t think they have some kind of fucking monopoly on ethics and morality.

By the time McCain finished his interview with pastor Rick Warren…I was curled up in a fetal position in my chair, wrapped in a mohair throw, practically sucking my thumb.

If only she could stay that way until after election day.

Plus…I’m sorry, but “mohair throw”? What a cunt.

McCain did a great job of making me feel confident. He was clearly in his element at Saddleback, among supportive evangelical Christians, and he went a long way toward alleviating their fears about his inability to communicate with them in their own language.

Oh great. McCain finally figured out how to speak Bigot.

But wait, readers, for Quinn is about to get to the topic of Obama’s performance:

Obama came first, and he handled himself well in front of an audience that clearly disagrees with him on many issues.

Yes, he’s black and they disagree with that.

…He was low-key, thoughtful and nuanced. That kind of nuance is hard to understand sometimes -- it's unclear, complicated. Obama's world can be scarier. It's multicultural. It's realistic (yes, there is evil on the streets of this country as well as in other places, and a lot of evil has been perpetrated in the name of good). It's honest.

So, evangelical voters are scared of thinking, nuance, non-Caucasians, realism and honesty. I must admit that I’ve rarely seen anyone on the political right speak so frankly about their constituency.

When does life begin? Only the antiabortionists are clear on that. For the majority of Americans (who are pro-choice), it is "above my pay grade," in Obama's words, where there is no hard and fast line to draw on what's worth dying for, and where people of all faiths have to be respected.

It’s true that the majority of Americans believe a woman’s body does not become government domain simply because she is pregnant. A majority of Americans believe that the woman is the best person to decide whether she must dedicate her life and her body to the growing of another life. Obama is acknowledging that the decision is not his to know, or to make. Now, you may think, as does professional tool and fellow WaPo columnist Michael Gerson, that that is a “silly” point of view. Gerson believes that if Obama is unsure of when a fetus gains human rights, he should err on the side of “innocent life,” which, just to be clear, does not refer to the pregnant woman.

Ah, but the depths of his idiocy are for another day, for Ms. Quinn is about to get to the climax of her rather sordid confessional:

I would rather live in McCain’s world than Obama’s. But I believe that we live in Obama’s world.

And there it is, in all its stunning simplicity and arrogance. The mourning of a long-ago world full of violence, machismo, intolerance, and closed-minded bigotry, and the grudging acknowledgment that by doing so, she is indulging in a childish fantasy. I would applaud her for that recognition, if only she weren’t so fucking sad about it.