I’m so fighting mad right now

I was in a bar, talking to friends. Some guy comes in and passes around some cutesy, printed out e-mail about how no one who has Irish ancestry should vote for anyone but McCain. It gets passed to me.

I read it. In its folksy way, it points out how Obama, who is a lawyer who is married to a lawyer, beat out another lawyer who is married to a lawyer…blah blah blah. It just made me mad. It touched a subterranean river of anger in me that’s been slowly getting deeper and wider over the last eight years. I did something childish. I crumpled up the paper and threw it back.

My friend, who had passed to me, passed it back to the originator and apologized for me. “He crumpled up your paper. I’m so sorry.”

“Hmmph,” the man said. “He must be a liberal.”

That made me see red. I corrected him. “No,” I said back to him. “I’m a proud liberal.”

I was so mad, all I could do was pay my check and get out of there. Nothing pisses me off like the folksy, middle-class “let’s throw our votes with the rich” sentiment.

But what really made me angry was the way he used “liberal” as an epithet, like criminal.

Thomas Jefferson was a liberal. Ben Franklin was a liberal. Franklin Roosevelt was a liberal. John Kennedy was a liberal. I am a liberal.

And John McCain who seeks to leave Iraq “with honor,” who says we might be there for “a hundred years,” let me ask you this one question: Since there were no WMDs or connections to Al Qaida, and we started that war in Iraq without honor, how in the Hell do you think we’re going to find it in leaving?