Thinking it over ... Bitter — or stupid?

By Félix Alfonso Peña

© 2008 Félix Alfonso Peña

All rights reserved

12 April, 2008

Dear Middle American, Pro-Gun, Anti-Gay Voter:

If you’re not bitter, you’re a chump.

That’s assuming you’re not one of those people who made out like a bandit at the expense of the chumps.

But if you’re among the chumps, take heart: You will never be lonely, because modern politics has become nothing if not a very productive chump factory.

It’s not surprising considering the abundance of raw material among the electorate, but the issue wasn’t grist for the media mill until Sen. Barack Obama broached the subject of your chumphood.

Obama did not outright call you a chump, of course. I said that. Obama called you bitter, for which his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton, took him to task, calling him an elitist.

Now, an elitist is easily defined as somebody who’s smarter than you and doesn’t hide it, but we’ll leave that aside for now.

The little contretemps in the media came about after Clinton took a swipe at Obama for saying that people in small-town America left powerless and bitter by the political process "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Clinton, of course, wasted no time in explaining that Americans cling to faith — she called it believing in God — for personal reasons.

And she warmly recalled her father teaching her how to shoot when she was a little girl.

That’s warm on recall, but fuzzy on memory, because Clinton seems to have forgotten how in the latest national election the Republicans rallied people to “God and guns and get the gays.”

Never mind that under the Republican watch our country had been successfully attacked and the mastermind of the slaughter was still alive and mocking us with more threats. We had to keep gays from getting married because the Bible told us so.

You would’ve thought the Gay Liberation Front had flown those airplanes into the World Trade Center, but the chumps went for the bait.

While jobs began heading south, along with the economy, while shoddy mortgage practices inflated the price of homes into a “bubble” that eventually burst and took stock prices with it, the issues that rallied the people to the Republican cause were whether kids could pray in school, whether we needed a constitutional amendment that defined marriage as solely between a man and a woman, whether the liberals were trying to take people’s guns away.

And the chumps swallowed the hook.

While the Republicans, with solid Democratic support, were getting us into historic debt by embarking on an utterly useless war with no exit strategy, they warned the public against voting for those tax-and-spend liberals who would ruin us financially and take God out of the schools.

And the chumps swallowed the line and the sinker.

Let’s face it, flags and Bibles are chump-bait in this country. Wave one, thump the other, and you’re not going home with less than the legal political limit of chump-votes, which is all you can carry.

Start to talk about what the flag represents and what the Bible teaches, and you lose the chumps.

Chumps also think guns make the difference between freedom and tyranny.

They worry more about the caliber of their weapons than about the caliber of their government.

Small wonder we have so many political misfires: Chumps can vote. I’m sure there are even some super-chumps out there ready to make that decisive vote based on Christianity, the religion of peace and forgiveness, and the guns that define it.

Getting back to Obama, he apologized, of course, for offending small-town Americans. He could have said it better, he stated.

I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry there are so many chumps for the politicians to manipulate.

If that offends you, you must understand: I’m bitter.