I have never voted for Barack Obama.

Had I the opportunity, I’m sure I would liked to have. So far as I can tell, his qualifications seem impeccable, and he certainly comes across as an intelligent and thoughtful person. The occasion has yet to present itself that I would have had the privilege of voting for him. Most people around here assume I have, that I am in the tank for Obama because he’s black, which is not true. First of all, Barack Obama is not black. He’s biracial. But nobody pays any attention to that, the demonstrably racist Congressional conservatives who irrationally and pathologically hate him least of all. It would be impossible for these bigots to accept, on any level, that, the color of his skin notwithstanding, Barack Obama is just as white—just as American—as any of them. I did not vote for Barack Obama because he was black because I’ve never once voted for Barack Obama. I’d like to say I did. I surely blacked-in the little circle next to his name, but I wasn’t voting for him. When you vote for someone, you consider their record, their campaign, their character. You debate your choice, weighing the pros and cons. You become excited, even a little giddy, about Your Guy or Your Gal. That’s never been the case for me. In terms of his presidential races, I’ve never voted for Obama so much as he was simply the default candidate. In both 2008 and 2012 the Republican party failed to offer a qualified alternative. It was either Obama or vote for the joke Libertarian or Green Party candidate like Rosanne Barr. My vote had much less to do with who Barack Obama is as a person as it did the Republicans’ continuing insistence on insulting my intelligence and threatening my liberty by nominating unqualified candidates.

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I’m actually fairly frustrated that, along with the host of choices the Republicans, who claim to prefer smaller government while incongruously expanding it to threaten civil liberties, are trying to take away, they’ve also taken away my voting rights. Time after time, these conservative lunatics, who treat the U.S. presidency as if it is some sort of middle-school popularity contest, have made my decision for me. I never picked Obama—Republicans picked Obama by running monkeys against him. It was Obama or the monkey. Inexperience versus the indescribably poor judgment of Gidget and Grandpa. A mixed presidential record versus Thurston Howell III, the millionaire dilettante who runs for president as a hobby. Voting for Obama, in 2008 or 2012, wasn’t much of a choice. Despite their feigned enthusiasm, people who voted for McCain or Romney wrestled with their conscience to do so, to hand over the leadership of the free world in a time of global economic turmoil to sensationalistic neo-fascist cartoon characters like Sarah Palin or demonstrably empty suits like Mitt Romney. Obama was never my choice, he was the choice of a Republican party who consistently abandons both common sense and a responsibility to the American public by running these quadrennial puppet shows, fielding a weak cast of laughable caricatures straight out of a Saturday Night Live skit. I’ve little doubt I would have voted for Obama anyway, but the GOP, now entirely co-opted by gun-toting, irrational screaming extremists in foam rubber Statue of Liberty hats spewing racist epithets while claiming to be “Christians,” has, time and again, made that choice for me.

These old white people, resentful of MTV and frightened by whatever ‘Facebook” is, are irrational extremists who hate spics and Jews and niggers. These are the only demographics falling for the GOP’s tired rhetoric of Blame Obama For Everything. The economic crisis this nation faces was caused and prolonged by Republicans who treat the American people like they’re too stupid to know that. Republican fingerprints are on every piece of destructive legislation that caused this crisis and every single obstructionist tactic to block the president’s efforts to resolve it, and the American people know it.