There seems to be a genre of DKos diaries focusing on responses to right-wing emails from family members. I have considered adding my own take on this theme, as I (just like many of you) repeatedly dealt with the "Obama is a secret Muslim" strain of emails during the campaign, from my parents, cousins, etc. I decided against it because that meme is and was so played out that I felt I had nothing new to add. Well, I still have nothing truly new to add, but this particular email forward I received (from my favorite cousin no less!) this morning was just the straw that broke the camels back and caused the floodgates to open (and any other cliché you want to throw in there about pushing someone too far).
Following is the original email:
Here's an excellent letter to the President. I wish I had written that one so I can be on Obama's s**** list. The school teacher really nailed him.
How many millions of Americans across this Country think exactly what this school teacher has put in this email. What scares me is that every single day - - something surfaces that has been signed as a "Presidential order", or suddenly just appears as law! WHO does this stuff, while we're all sleeping at night? Those printing presses in DC must run night and day.
This first (heaven help us), 100 days have been the most destructive period of time in our Nation's history - - - and we don't even know the half of it!
April 17, 2009
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington , DC 20500
Mr. Obama:
I have had it with you and your administration, sir. Your conduct on your recent trip overseas has convinced me that you are not an adequate representative of the United States of America collectively or of me personally.
You are so obsessed with appeasing the Europeans and the Muslim world that you have abdicated the responsibilities of the President of the United States of America. You are responsible to the citizens of the United States .. You are not responsible to the peoples of any other country on earth.
I personally resent that you go around the world apologizing for the United States telling Europeans that we are arrogant and do not care about their status in the world. Sir, what do you think the First World War and the Second World War were all about if not the consideration of the peoples of Europe? Are you brain dead? What do you think the Marshall Plan was all about? Do you not understand or know the history of the 20th century?
Where do you get off telling a Muslim country that the United States does not consider itself a Christian country? Have you not read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States? This country was founded on Judeo-Christian ethics and the principles governing this country, at least until you came along, come directly from this heritage. Do you not understand this?
Your bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia is an affront to all Americans. Our President does not bow down to anyone, let alone the king of Saudi Arabia. You don't show Great Britain , our best and one of our oldest allies, the respect they deserve yet you bow down to the king of Saudi Arabia .. How dare you, sir! How dare you!
You can't find the time to visit the graves of our greatest generation because you don't want to offend the Germans but make time to visit a mosque in Turkey .. You offended our dead and every veteran when you give the Germans more respect than the people who saved the German people from themselves. What's the matter with you?
I am convinced that you and the members of your administration have the historical and intellectual depth of a mud puddle and should be ashamed of yourselves, all of you.
You are so self-righteously offended by the big bankers and the American automobile manufacturers yet do nothing about the real thieves in this situation, Mr. Dodd, Mr. Frank, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelic, the Fannie Mae bonuses, and the Freddie Mac bonuses. What do you intend to do about them? Anything? I seriously doubt it.
What about the U.S. House members passing out $9.1 million in bonuses to their staff members - on top of the $2.5 million in automatic pay raises that lawmakers gave themselves? I understand the average House aide got a 17% bonus. I took a 5% cut in my pay to save jobs with my employer. You haven't said anything about that. Who authorized that? I surely didn't!
Executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be receiving $210 million in bonuses over an eighteen-month period, that's $45 million more than the AIG bonuses. In fact, Fannie and Freddie executives have already been awarded $51 million - not a bad take. Who authorized that and why haven't you expressed your outrage at this group who are largely responsible for the economic mess we have right now.
I resent that you take me and my fellow citizens as brain-dead and not caring about what you idiots do.
We are watching what you are doing and we are getting increasingly fed up with all of you.
I also want you to know that I personally find just about everything you do and say to be offensive to every one of my sensibilities.
I promise you that I will work tirelessly to see that you do not get a chance to spend two terms destroying my beautiful country.
Sincerely,
Every real American
P.S. I rarely ask that emails be 'passed around'.............PLEASE SEND THIS TO YOUR EMAIL LIST......it's past time for all Americans to wake up!
All the lazy right-wing talking point memes are there, but the one that really strikes me is that the letter is signed "Every real American." I don't have to explain to this group why I take offense to that sentiment, so I'll just save my keystrokes.
Anyway, I hit "reply all" and just started typing. This is what came out:
Dear friends and family:
I debated a long time about if and how to respond to all of the anti-Obama email forwards I've gotten from you, and I've done a pretty good job of biting my tongue for the past year and a half, but this particular email got to me, and I think it deserves a response. The best I can do is this:
I'm a Democrat. And if that weren't bad enough, I could accurately be described as a particularly liberal one. I caucused for Mr. Obama in the primaries, and canvassed for him in the general election, and in general, I have been very pleased with the way he is governing this country and representing us abroad.
I know none of you knew that about me, so I'll let that sink in for just a second. Feel free to take a break if need be before reading the rest...
Regained your composure? OK, now, on to the subject I want to write about; namely these email forwards you've all felt the need to include me on:
OK, I get it. You guys don't like President Obama, you think the country is headed straight to hell, and you're understandably upset. Well, I don't personally understand the anger you feel, but I can put myself in your shoes and understand the outrage expressed in the emails you choose to keep forwarding. That said, I could write for days refuting the misinformation in these email forwards, but for right now, let me rebut just one of the many points in this particular email, which is a particularly infuriating one for me:
First, I recognize the importance of the Church to you in general and your personal relationship with Jesus Christ in particular, and keeping that in mind, please realize that I mean no disrespect when I say: President Obama is 100% correct, we are in fact NOT a Christian nation. We never have been. The writers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution went to great lengths to avoid the invocation of a specific deity, and even though the phrase "endowed by our Creator" is included, there is no implication that this phrase refers to the God of Abraham (i.e. the God common to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.) This is what makes our system of government different from (and in my opinion, far superior to) the theocratic governments of the Middle East. You see, our government is secular for the simple reason that, if we were to explicitly state that we are a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles, the next question we have to ask is, "Whose Christianity are we going to use?" I mean, there are profound doctrinal and theological differences between, say, Southern Baptists and Catholics, or between Lutherans and the Church of Christ. Which version are you going to adopt?
Notwithstanding that it would be unconstitutional for this nation to formally call itself a "Christian nation", it would be monumentally insulting to those of us who are not Christians. For example, in the laboratory in which I work, I have colleagues who are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, while I consider myself an agnostic. Personally, I don't know whether or not God or any "higher power" exists, and quite frankly, I don't care. I guess you could say I'm a materialist; if there is a spirit world outside of my tangible reality, I have remained blind to it's presence.
Without getting too long winded here, in the same way that you wouldn't want me to declare this an Agnostic nation, or you wouldn't want my Pakistani co-worker to declare this a Muslim nation, or my Indian co-worker to declare this a Hindu nation, I find it off-putting that you would declare this a Christian nation. The establishment clause protects us all, and means that even those of us who are not Judeo-Christian adherents can still be patriotic Americans, in spite of the views of the emails you choose to send me.
This is the end of the first installment, but since you all insist on forwarding me this stuff, it will be the first of many installments, and I will systematically take apart the arguments in each of these forwards that you send.
The thing is, I'm a bit of a chickenshit, so it's just sitting in my drafts folder.
Any words of encouragement and/or suggestions for improvement are welcome.
UPDATE:
Thanks for all those who commented. I didn't send this version, since several of the commenters were right, it's way too verbose and they wouldn't have read it. So I'm paring it down and making it a little tighter and easier to read before sending it.
And special thanks to Silent Lurker for the diary-length comment below. Good stuff.