Oh Jimmy my Jimmy

Oh Jimmy my Jimmy



that's how my poem will start, my Ode to Jimmy Carter, a man whom I greatly respect, because he has actually done more for the cause of peace than any other person on this planet, and we simply don't know it, because, like all true acts of kindness, they were done without fanfare and without a desire for applause.



Heck, I even defended him against my own supposedly Christian brethren who wanted to vilify him and condemn him to Hell for daring to renounce his Baptist membership. (By the way, for those of you still on the fence about this whole Jesus thing, here's some good news: Christ is completely non-denominational - denominations were made by humans, all that is Christlike is from God)



Yet, still, oh Jimmy! I still can't believe that you actually came out and said that the conservatives don't like President Obama because they can't stand having a black man in the White House. (and as an aside, how come Nas has not made a hit song "Black Man in the White House" yet? I've been waiting for him or somebody to make a record like that!)



Maybe Mr. Carter is simply speaking the words that nobody else will speak - and if that is true then more power to him! He knows these guys better than I do - he runs in their circles . . . perhaps he's airing their dirty laundry, because he knows it's time to do so and he's the guy who can do it.



The conservatives, of course, deny this, and the liberals distance themselves from it because they openly fear the Republican party. (Let's face it folks, in this playground of US politics, the liberals are the four-eyed nerds and the Republicans are the playground bullies.) So they don't want to anger them any more than they have to.



But still, I want to give the conservatives SOME credit - I actually want to beleive that they don't care that President Obama is (half) black (and ALL American!), and that their ire is simply because they do not like his policies.



Let's face it - the Republican Party has always been the anti-government party - they don't want government in anything . . . which always makes me wonder why they're there - it's like choosing to go to a college that you want to see lose its accreditation, or taking a job at a company that you want to go bankrupt. Perhaps this self-loathing is the reason behind much of their detestable proclivities.



Still, if we stick with the "small government" sentiment, then of course they're going to hate what the President seeks to do. And they HAVE burst blood vessels in their heads over the words "public option" . . . so I would truly like to think that they are against him like they would have been against Hillary had she won.



But then, that would have been sexist, and I personally beleive that sexism is still more rampant than racism - well, at the very least in the nasty political cartoons and jokes, one can still show Hillary hiking up her skirt to use a man's urinal but you can't draw a cartoon about a monkey on the loose and mention Obama in the same panel. Both are detestable, and should not exist in a civilized country, but the former was promulgated all over the Internet to laughs and gaffs during the campaign, but the latter was shunned and denied and despised.



Perhaps, though, it is that cartoon that made Mr. Carter make his statement. Perhaps he sees that, behind this veneer of supposed intolerance to anti-black ideas, there still lurks the same "lynch all of THEM" mentality that only occasionally leaks out into the surface of our public consciousness.



Perhaps my Jimmy is correct after all, only time will tell.



VG