Puffin’s Place

If you hear or read some preposterous charges about Barack or Michelle Obama, check the charges out at Fight the Smears. Or send people who like to dabble in the outlandish to that site so these smears can be debunked before—one hopes—they grow really long legs. If you have a few pennies lying about, you can contribute to keeping the site going.

Meanwhile, we watch the astounding debate over whether noting McCain’s malapropisms and mis-statements is a cruel exercise of ageism. Good lord, it would appear that one’s sex, one’s color, one’s age automatically confer excellence upon one. Any criticism of anyone who can wave an identify label immediately becomes an attach on a race, a sex, a physiological condition, or an age.

I am curious about where so many of us have hidden from ourselves the right to disagree. The combination  of decades of political correctness and identity politics has robbed us of a large portion of our brains.

We can find McCain inept and dismal and not hate all people over 70. We can disagree with Obama and not want him president and not be racists. We can even shudder at Hillary and not be guilty of sexism. We can, in short, exercise our capacity of distinctions and judgment without—no matter the gasps of the chattering class—doing anything more than exercising our own right to disagree and make choices.