Can They Still Say It Isn't Fear-Mongering If the Word "Scare" Appears 22 Times?

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA FROM LOU PRITCHETT

AND A POINT-BY-POINT RESPONSE IN BOLD BY ME



Dear President Obama:

You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me.

Dear Lou Pritchett, this is the first time in my 28 years of being alive that there is not a Bush either in the White House or the Governor’s Mansion of the state in which I reside. That’s the really scary thing. Unlike you, this is the first time in 28 years that I feel a sense of slight relief.

You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=barack+obama&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10

You’re welcome. Welcome to the magical world of reading and knowing! Go get ‘em, tiger! Also, ummm, the whole premise of this letter and the opinions stated below would lead me to believe you know a lot about him. I don't think I know as much stuff about my mom as you know about Obama judging by your list of greivances with him.

You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.

Household income for Barack and Michelle Obama for 2006 (his Senate salary + her salary + book sales/royalties)

http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2007/04/sweet_blog_extra_barack_and_mi.html

As far as his education, one would presume it would be a combination of student loans and scholarships and maybe some help from his family? Like an overwhelming majority of college students have done for decades? I’m okay with this explanation. Moreso, I’m curious as to what dastardly theories you have on how Obama paid for school.

You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.



If a Harvard-educated Senator who lives in Chicago with his lawyer wife and their two young children in an upscale neighborhood and like to do things like go to baseball games and take their daughters to see the Jonas Brothers in concert is “culturally not American” then I am Mongolian. The Obamas out-American me a million times over. But I think the correct term you are looking for to express your sentiment is this:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/xenophobia

You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.

Yes because the true mark of a good president is their previous experience in business.
Like maybe running a newspaper?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_G._Harding

Or even more recently, we had George W. Bush, who was a businessman. Was he a good businessman? Let’s take a looksee:

http://alaric3rh.home.sprynet.com/science/bceo.html

You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don't understand it at its core.

Here’s a pretty good analysis of George W. Bush’s military experience. I know you aren’t outright saying that you preferred W to Obama but you should have theoretically been just as terrified for this guy to be instigating wars:

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/opinion/lechliter.pdf

You scare me because you lack humility and 'class', always blaming others.

Matter of personal opinion. I guess you mean “class” like this?:



Or like this maybe?




You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail.

See also:






You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the 'blame America' crowd and deliver this message abroad.

http://www.vexen.co.uk/USA/hateamerica.html

Guess what dude? We’re an awesome country but awesome in the way that Vin Diesel eventually stops the stops the crazy bad guy but not before killing lots of innocent people in the process, breaking lots of people’s furniture or plate glass windows and possibly fucking someone else’s wife or girlfriend in the process. In other words, we are big and bad and we do git-r-dun, so to speak, but we do need some accountability.

You scare me because you want to change America to a European style country where the government sector dominates instead of the private sector.

“European style government”. Huh? Wait, am I supposed to be scared of things that are vaguely European?

I’m assuming you like Fox News so you should LOVE this article about America sliding down the life expectancy rankings:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,293008,00.html

An excerpt…” For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care , nutrition and lifestyles.
Countries that surpass the U.S. include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.”

You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a government controlled one.

Please refer back to the Fox News link above. Please note the countries whose life expectancies are higher than ours. Please note how many have government run health care.

You scare me because you prefer 'wind mills' to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale reserves.

You know who would probably totally agree with you? Oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens...oh wait….no. No he doesn’t.

You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=american+standard+of+living+decline&aq=0&oq=american+standard+of+living+&aqi=g5

You’re welcome.

You scare me because you have begun to use 'extortion' tactics against certain banks and corporations.

Latin extorqu re, extort-, to wrench out, extort.
Soooooo, you mean like this?...

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/16/AIG.bonuses/index.html

You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view/20090721democrats_challenge_obama_signing_statement/

You’re welcome.

You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Barack_Obama_presidential_campaign_endorsements,_2008

So this is a list of dummies? Even the Republicans?

You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.

Unless Barack Obama texted you recently claiming to be “omnipotent” or “omniscient”, that is merely your opinion. Nothing wrong with opinions. I thought George W. Bush was a vastly under-qualified failed businessman turned failed politician. But again, that’s my opinion.

You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=obama+failure&aq=0&oq=obama+fail&aqi=g10

“Results 1 - 10 of about 27,800,000 for obama failure. (0.25 seconds) “

You’re welcome.

You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the Limbaughs, Hannitys, O'Relllys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of view.

Silence? All those people still have their respective shows. And demonize? They do that pretty well for themselves…

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/28/national/main1561324.shtml

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/1013043mackris1.html

http://tv.popcrunch.com/bill-oreilly-loses-it-inside-edition-video-clip/

You scare me because you prefer controlling over governing.

transitive verb 1 a : to exercise continuous sovereign authority over; especially : to control and direct the making and administration of policy in b : to rule without sovereign power and usually without having the authority to determine basic policy

Eh oh. What do we do when the very definition of the “good word” contains the “bad word” you listed in your fears?

Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years.

I have no idea why. Carpal Tunnel? The decline of snail mail due to the ease of email? Stamp shortage? Hand cramps? Amphetamine-induced paranoia? Paper cuts?

My proverbial mouth is filling with proverbial blood right now. I have bit my tongue on this one but I finally decided to blog it out. Let’s talk about Josh Hamilton for a second. First off, let’s discuss how the news of the Body Shots Heard Round the World was broken to me on Saturday. A friend called me and without even saying hello, he asked me why “my boy” thinks it’s okay to ruin someone’s career and publish trashy tabloid-esque pictures of Josh Hamilton drinking at a bar with some girls on Deadspin. This is funny to me for many reasons. The first one being that my friend referred to Will Leitch as “my boy” though we have exchanged a total of two emails and Will no longer writes for Deadspin other than the occasional guest column. The second reason is that my gut reaction, which with a few days reflection has not changed a single bit, was “If you’ve made a name and source of income largely off of your position as God’s Sobriety Solider, pictures like that need to surface.” The story got funnier as my friend defended Josh Hamilton and lambasted Deadspin, saying that the account he heard on sports radio as the story broke was, “It’s him with a couple of girls around him at a bar.” While we were on the phone, I looked up the pictures on Deadspin. As my friend made his case against Deadspin, I interrupted him to say that I had found the pictures and then just repeated the word “Wow” over and over again. My friend said, “Are they that bad? How many of them are there?” I then went through each pictures with my descriptions getting more lurid in accordance with each picture. The phone call ended abruptly as my friend said, “Alright, I might need to go look at these. I’ll talk to you later.”

The most important caveat to the rant that I am about to issue forth is this: addicts slip up. Sobriety is an ongoing challenge. No one (at least no one I know) faults the guy for, as one Deadspin commenter said, realizing “This getting drunk in bars with hot college girls is fun. I miss the hell out of this.” Yes, we all know it’s a slippery slope from a few lemondrops off the suntanned stomach of a kinesiology major to blowing dealers for an eight ball. The guy should NOT be crucified (that will come in later) for relapsing. And he told his wife and his team what he did. Good for him. The fact that it appears that he either neglected to tell his sobriety coach, one who you might argue could totally use to know about something like this, or that he might have a sobriety coach who believes that honesty is not necessarily the best policy seems sketchvilles to me. When your sobriety coach denies the legitimacy of such pictures only to have you confirm their legitimacy the next day, methinks that the lines of communication may be frayed a bit. That’s, of course, the optimistic take on it. It would be far more disturbing to learn that your sobriety coach is also a cover-your-ass coach, wouldn’t it?

A big reason why I decided to blog about this, though I am most assuredly sick of hearing the name Josh Hamilton or anything about the topic at this point, is Richie Whitt. I don’t comment on the Dallas Observer Sportatorium blog that Richie Whitt writes. Or really any blog for that matter. But this is the first time I felt genuinely compelled to comment. Full disclosure: there are MANY things about which Richie and I disagree. Those topics include local sports radio preferences, his approach to certain local radio personalities habitual personal and professional failings, his insistence on the hotness of bony and boyish females. In fact, there are times when I think that, though we both love sports, it’s really only on politics where Richie and I seem to agree. I have never met the guy so it’s easy to have a neutral and unbiased opinion on his writing and views. But I was really happy to see him, in the wake of the Redi-Whip Ruination of Josh Hamilton, express the exact same frustrations and anger that I had over the whole situation.

People slip up, sure. The general public does not need to be informed of every personal and domestic problem in a pro athletes life, obviously. But when your image is almost exclusively contained under the guise of born-again Christian whose faith has made it possible for him to overcome addiction, you are different. You have set a bar for yourself which you not only must publicly measure up to but from which you also profit from both personally and monetarily. In other words, you make money from the views your espouse. You get paid for speeches. You get paid for books. You get paid for your story and the tales you spin about your ongoing ability to maintain your sobriety through your religious faith. Therefore, if you slip up, it’s like an auto recall. The whole car isn’t a write off. It will still drive. But you have to let people know that something’s wrong. Something happened. Because otherwise, you not only risk being accused of being a hypocrite but you also are selling a product (in this case, yourself) under false pretenses. Put it this way, let’s say I am a coach at a Christian academy and I have booked you to speak to my varsity basketball team about how Jesus has made you put away the pipe and hit homeruns and get metaphorical straight-A’s in the game of life. Then let’s say these pictures came out the next day. I would consider you, as a product, to be in violation of the Fair Trading Act which prohibits false or misleading representations about goods or services .

But somehow, this has become a hot button issue because the fact that he is a Christian and invokes his religion as part of his “ruin to redemption” package makes him above reproach. It is “picking on him” or “kicking him when he’s down” to point out that he has slipped up and seems to have, in collusion with his team, swept the incident under the rug. I guess I am confused about what sort of cloak of indomitability his religion affords him. We are not to question if his actions were hypocritical as that would be tantamount to religious persecution? So it’s fair game to demonize professional baseball players who collected fees for motivational speeches or profited off books they wrote about how hard work and grueling physical training lead them to gain 30 pounds of muscle mass in one off season once we find out that it was more HGH than cardio and weights that brought them those results? They are, and should be, fair game for ridicule and public flogging, right? Well, when one’s own personal human growth hormone is the healing power of Christ or a poster of Footprints or a huge cross tattoo across your back, you have to know that people are going to come down hard on you when you act in a very un-Christlike manner at a bar in Tempe, Arizona. That is unless Christ was way into body shots and fake doggy-style humping of co-eds.

So to all the commenters on Sportatorium who have taken time out of their busy schedule of predicting the demise of (X) (Y) or (Z) talk radio station long enough to cry Kulturkamp because someone dare take Josh Hamilton to task over his hypocrisy in light of his religious profiteering, don’t worry. This story’s news cycle is nearing completion and we can soon all go back to believing that Alex Rodriguez never knew that his cousin was not a trusted source of medical advice and that Tony Romo has learned his lesson and will stay away from celebrity tail this season.

GO. SEE. FUNNY PEOPLE.

It’s hard to write something about a movie without ruining any part of the movie. So this won’t be very detailed but let me say that if you read my previous blog entry about my distaste for most recent movies and my excitement about seeing Funny People over the weekend, let me just put it this way: Funny People was possibly the best movie I have seen in several years. I went into it both expecting to like it and being fully aware of its’ running time. And when the credits started rolling, I turned to my friend and said, “Honestly, I could have done with a little more movie.” I cannot stress to you how impatient I normally am with movies so the fact that I thought the more than two and half hours was not enough says volumes.

I started thinking about how apparently some people thought the movie was too long and I searched my brain with a fine tooth comb to try to think of a single scene that the movie could have done without and I couldn’t think of a single scene. In fact, before I saw the movie, I watched a total of three Making of/Behind the Scenes specials about the movie and figured that I would probably end up having seen half of the movie before I even saw it in the theater. Turns out, the stuff that I saw on TV that actually made it to the movie represents a sum total of about six minutes of the movie. And once I left the theater, I started to wonder what make up the bonus features on the eventual DVD. I was hoping it wasn’t just the Behind the Scenes/standup stuff that I had already Tivo’ed and seen. So if you’re keeping score, the movie runs 2 hours and 40 minutes. I have watched 3 hours of additional standup and commentary on TV specials. And I still want more. That means that at this point, I want the movie’s running time to be over 6 hours. And this isn’t a bit, I’m not being funny (people). It’s an emotionally intense film but also it's an intensely funny movie. Viva la Movies again!

So if you’re keeping score, The Return of Amanda’s Will to Live can be currently attributed to:

1. Funny People
2. Football

Football is back. I’m slowly emerging from my deep, dark hole of pessimism. I’m sure the Cowboys will drag me back down into that hole by the BYE. Heh, I said “by the BYE”. Heh.