I live with an older woman who is a screaming tea-bagging off-the-charts right winger.
I travel for work, which makes it a little more bearable, but when I got home yesterday, there she is, and she has something she wants to show me.
"Someone sent me pictures of Barack Obama's mother posing naked." she said.
"God, that's awful," I said. I was making dinner and couldn't get to my computer to run her usual bullshit through Google, which NEVER YET has failed to debunk her shit.
"Yeah, you want to see them? It's Obama's mother. She's posing naked with her ass sticking out."
"No, I don't want to see them," I said. "I didn't look at those pictures of Carrie Prejean when they came out. I just wouldn't have felt right about it. I think it's so terribly sad."
"It is," she said.
"No, that someone would send around naked pictures of a guy's mother because they don't like his politics. It's tragic."
"Oh. Yeah, the guy that sent them to me is a real heavy republican guy," she said, shoving her hands in her pockets and heading out for her millionth cigarette.
The next thing I know, she has her laptop propped open on the kitchen counter. In black and white was a picture of a pretty woman who looked like Ann Dunham. She was posing nude in what looked like a living room at Christmas.
"Her ass is as wide as the kitchen sink," said my roommate of the slim woman.
"That's awful. I can't imagine being the kind of person that would send this stuff around," I said. "It's such a bully maneuver."
I was so sad. When I finished dinner, I ran the thing through Snopes. Sure enough, it was bullshit, and was debunked more than a year ago. The woman in the picture is not Ann Dunham. It's a model who looks kind of like her.
So I went to my roommate's facebook page and found a string of comments about the pictures. It was her friends, all vowing to spread the photos everywhere. In the string of comments was my roommate, saying she would send them to everyone she could think of.
I posted the link to Snopes in her string of comments.
"It's not her," I wrote. No one has commented since.
This is the family values party? The people who call little kids "fat" (Limbaugh on Sasha and Malia) who call them stupid (Beck on the Obama kids' reaction to the oil crisis) and who send around pics of what they believe to be naked pictures of a man's dead mother?
I don't know why this should have offended me worse than all the other bullshit. It just seems like a new low.
Yet Obama during the 2008 campaign put the Palin kids off limits. Let's keep being the better party.