The Election of 2012

Well, here we are, just a little over a week away before the Presidential election of 2012, and I am becoming increasingly nervous. Polls show the race in a dead heat, 49% to 49%, meaning that we could either end up re-electing our wonderful and intelligent President or a corporate shill who is also a notorious flip-flopper and whose running mate is a sanctimonious misogynist TEA Party favorite. What really appalls me is that throughout this entire election season, male GOP legislative candidates have been making absolutely offensive statements about rape, and I swear, I can't remember an campaign season that focused more on male legislators twisting in the wind trying to redefine rape and explain away women's bodies. We've had one candidate so much as imply that women's privates seem to have an almost magical ability to shut down and prevent pregnancy in the event of a rape, another one saying that he's never heard of a pregnancy resulting from statutory rape, another one saying that if a woman becomes pregnant from a rape that God somehow intended for it to happen.....well....you get the idea. I don't want a bunch of sanctimonious male legislators making decisions about women's health care. We are smart enough to take care of ourselves, thank you. I am extremely offended at these kinds of remarks being made by these men and yet.....AND YET.....women are still voting for them! And polls seem to indicate that their leads among female voters IS GROWING! For the life of me, I can't figure this out. Are women becoming collectively stupid or something? What has gone wrong in our country when women are supporting male candidates who basically want to control their bodies, for heaven's sake? Have women lost their collective minds? I do not get this one bit. It looks very much like this election will be one big red tide across the country, a GOP tsunami, and we will find our country under the control of a bunch of holier than thou religious zealots who will basically overturn women's rights, forbid gays from having any rights at all, will reinstate Jim Crow laws, will continue suppressing voters rights and access to the ballot....the consequences could be terrifying, and Romney says that he will nominate Supreme Court justices in the mold of extreme right wing zealot Antonin Scalia, the most conservative Supreme Court justice of them all. This could affect policy for generations to come, so this election has major consequences. You aren't just electing a President, you are electing Supreme Court justices as well.

I'm just afraid that folks will give into all of the racism and fear mongering done by the GOP to paint Obama as some kind of boogeyman foreigner and will elect a corporate shill flip flopper who blows with the political winds and changes his mind daily on how he feels about things. If he were a Democrat running against a Republican, the GOP would be all over him mercilessly. They wouldn't tolerate any of what he has been doing, but their silence seems to indicate that, while most Republicans really don't like this guy, they're willing to vote for him not so much because they like him, but because he isn't black. Just today I read in the newspaper how racism is sharply on the rise. How terribly sad. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be devastated that so little progress has been made since his time. It's depressing to think that it's 2012 and we still have people who look down their collective noses at blacks and anybody who isn't white. I don't know what can be done about it, or IF anything can be done about it, or whether we are permanently trapped by America's original sin. Hard to say, but if the rising tide of racism is any indication, the oh-so-white GOP whose only real constituency is angry middle aged white males stands a very good chance of sweeping every single election next week. And that would be a very scary prospect indeed to have people in charge of running this country who want to turn us into a right wing Christian theocracy little better than the Taliban in Afghanistan. Stay tuned. It's going to be a very bumpy ride this next week.